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This paper argues that the nation's immigration laws are being misused to craft a system of preventive administrative detention of immigrant men, predominantly of Middle Eastern background. These detentions give rise to imprisonment without charge for weeks and months, denial of access to lawyers, physical and psychological abuse and ultimately deportations without a fair initial hearing or the exhaustion of available appellate recourse. I argue that this expanded use of civil immigration detention is designed to weaken constitutional due process protections, bringing into the U.S. detention tactics adopted abroad under the rubric of the war on terror. This paper also highlights similarities between the evolving administrative detention system in the United States and longer-standing practices in Israel.

This chapter draws on data from young men¹ interviewed on two occasions; first as ‘children’ aged 17 years within juvenile Young Offenders’ Institutions (YOIs); and then again as ‘adults’ aged 18 years within young adult/adult prisons about their experiences of transitions. Ethical reviews typically reflect age-determined constructions of child/adult status and those aged under 18 years are deemed to be more ‘vulnerable’, thus attracting more scrutiny from research ethics committees (Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC], 2020). This concern heightens the methodological difficulties of prison research, as incarceration renders children ‘doubly vulnerable’ (Jacobson & Talbot, 2017). Such institutions may be obstructive and access must be obtained from a series of gatekeepers. Negotiating the balance between participants’ rights and their best interests (Heptinstall, 2000; Thomas & O’Kane, 1998), along with gatekeepers’ priorities can be challenging. This chapter outlines how tricky ethical tensions were balanced with participants’ best interests in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (United Nations, 1989). Despite the difficulties encountered, the researcher (J.P.) took the view that there would be ‘ethical implication[s] of NOT conducting the research’ (Girling, 2017, p. 38). The chapter offers recommendations for how researchers might conduct ethically sensitive research with similar cohorts of young people.

This chapter reconstructs and critically examines the recent history of strip searches in Belgium. About 10 years ago the Belgian parliament adopted its first law on prisoners’ rights. A major part of the Prison Act of 12 January 2005 deals with disciplinary and control measures. Article 108, in particular, has provoked quite some controversy. It introduced a clear distinction between the (more superficial) search of an inmates’ clothes on the one hand, and the (substantially more intrusive) measure of strip searching on the other hand. The main difference between these two measures is that the latter involves forcing prisoners to strip naked. Because of their intrinsic intrusiveness, such strip searches were meant to be exceptional measures: they should only take place following an individual assessment and decision by the prison governor. In practice, however, the prison administration tended to interpret Article 108 somewhat differently and the line between searching an inmate’s clothes on the one hand and strip searching on the other became blurred.

I first discuss the problem of order in prisons and explore how strip searches have been regulated in Europe. I then reconstruct the recent history of the regulation of strip searches in Belgium. In order to make sense of this history, I mobilize some of the ideas of Stanley Cohen’s sociology of denial, in particular, his distinction between literal, implicatory and interpretive denial, and apply these to the history of strip searches in Belgium.

A consistent finding from this chapter is that the Belgian prison administration has – through creative manoeuvres of interpretive denial – been able to circumvent the new barriers that were erected by the Prison Act of 12 January 2005 and, in doing so, it has been able to continue stripping detainees naked without an individualized decision from the prison governor. The approach that I develop throughout this chapter helps us better appreciate the limits of legal reform and top-down (European) regulation of strip searches.

The chapter demonstrates that Stanley Cohen’s work on denial is not only useful for scholars who do research on gross human rights violations but also for interpreting more down-to-earth aspects of criminal justice systems across the globe.

On September 11th, 1973, started the darkest stage in the recent history of Chile. The military and the police, at the command of General Augusto Pinochet, executed the most atrocious acts against the human dignity that the country had witnessed. The martial and technocratic leaders of the dictatorship ripped apart and redesigned the institutions of the country at their will, through to the elimination of the opposition and the systematic violation of human rights, which reached any person or group. Just a few days after the coup d’état that brought Pinochet to power, the Cardinal and Archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, and a group of churches declared themselves against the devastating violence that was gripping the country. Immediately, the religious spaces took up the lead in the defense of the most vulnerable, the persecuted, marginalized, and poor. The major effort focused on the Vicariate of Solidarity, an organization of the Catholic Church in Chile that was tasked with the promotion and defense of human rights, which offered legal and social assistance to the victims and their families. The Vicariate quickly positioned itself as a leader in search of justice against the backdrop of repression, censorship, lack of representative institutions, and prohibition of popular movements. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyze the work of the Vicariate of Solidarity and its leading role in the fight against human rights violations, strengthening social reorganization, reconciliation, and the return to democracy in Chile.

This chapter discusses the use of law and legal institutions by the emerging social movement seeking to end Australia’s policy of mandatory detention for refugees and asylum seekers. Through an examination of Australian inquiries and court cases alongside social campaigns, it considers the ability of legal institutional responses to identify the harms, in particular state and institutional responsibility, and the subsequent impact of these legal processes in inhibiting and promoting social and structural change. It shows how social movements are harnessing law and creating new legal and civic spaces in which to contest Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker regime.

Expert witnessing in asylum cases involves depicting the conditions of the applicant’s home country as a context for judging a well-founded fear for life or safety. Most of the elements involved in the work of the expert country witness are dynamic and change over time, creating new challenges and new resources for describing and interpreting country context. Examining several characteristic Honduran asylum cases separated by 20 years reveals not only an increasingly complex and multifaceted set of relevant conditions in both the sending and the host country, but also a significant broadening of the anthropological “tool kit” available to the expert country witness (as the expert witness becomes aware of its relevance to country conditions at a particular time), and an increasingly reflexive and complex relationship of the expert witness to the country in question and to the court. In the interim, emerging problems of contextual complexity, subjectivity, changing and competing images of reality, and the shifting applicability of legal and sociological definitions and categories arise and can be partially addressed with emerging anthropological or social scientific resources, raising anew the nature of the relationship of the expert witness to the court and the possible mutual influence of social science and legal culture upon each other over time. As the number of refugee seekers increases globally, can expert witnesses trained in social sciences help asylum courts to imagine new ways of bridging the gap between legal regimes of governmentality and the subjectivity of refugees?