Immigration detention: An instrument in the fight against illegal immigration or a tool for its management?

Abstract

This contribution argues that immigration detention’s distinctly territorial logic needs to be fully accounted for in any attempt to understand the contemporary use of this instrument. As such, penal approaches to the study of detention policies need to be complemented and informed by constitutional and transnational legal scholarship, not only so that we can fully grasp the distinctiveness of immigration detention but also in order to be able to formulate adequate legal responses to this measure. This chapter substantiates these claims by taking a look at the case law of both the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) concerning the detention of irregular migrants.