Last week, #Unlocked18 visited Campsfield House IRC near Oxford. Since it opened in 1993, tens of thousands of people have been detained here indefinitely. The centre has also been the focus of many protests and a sustained campaign for its closure, as the graphic and blogs below demonstrate. This will be the final time Unlocking Detention visits Campsfield: a few weeks [...]
Image by @Carcazan This week, Unlocking Detention has been ‘visiting’ Campsfield House detention centre in Oxfordshire. The Duncan Lewis Public Law, Civil Litigation and Immigration teams put us in touch with Siarhei, who is currently detained in Campsfield. In addition to the normal barriers to communication faced by everyone in detention, Siarhei speaks no English, so Anastasija Vasiljeva in the Civil Litigation [...]
Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre opened 25 years ago this month. In this second part of a two-part blog, a campaigner from Campaign to Close Campsfield looks back at the local history of resistance. On 25 November 1993, the first people were brought from Harmondsworth (near Heathrow airport) to Camspfield detention centre. Twelve demonstrators met the two minibuses at Campsfield main gates [...]
Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre opened 25 years ago this month. In this first part of a two-part blog, a campaigner from Campaign to Close Campsfield looks back at its history and tries to make sense of the government’s announcement that Campsfield is to close. On Friday 9 November, the government announced that Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre is to close in [...]
In the final week of Unlocking Detention, we are now looking at where we will go from here. And we believe it is a perfect opportunity to publish this speech delivered last month by Jose, from the Freed Voices group to launch Amnesty’s #WriteForRights project. Jose says, ‘hope calls for action, just as action is impossible without hope’ and shares what gave him [...]
This blog was written by Bill MacKeith, joint organiser of the Campaign to Close Campsfield, for Unlocking Detention. Photos: Campaign to Close Campsfield On 25 November 1993, two white vans arrived at Campsfield main gates, 6 miles north of Oxford. They brought the first detainees to the new Campsfield detention centre from Harmondsworth near Heathrow. Since then some 30,000 people have been [...]
The focus of this week's #Unlocked17 tour was Campsfield House, near Oxford airport. It has been an immigration detention centre for almost a quarter of a century - a 24th anniversary demonstration took place this week. Since it was converted from a young offender institution to a detention centre in November 1993, over 30,000 people have been detained here. Up to 282 [...]
In this blog, Ruth Nicholson describes a day of Music In Detention's songwriting workshops in Campsfield House. Ruth is a musician, and a volunteer both for Music In Detention (MID) and the Detention Forum. This blog was originally published by Music in Detention in March this year here where you can also listen to the music recorded in Campsfield. On a foggy, chilly morning [...]
This piece is written for Unlocking Detention by ‘Jose’ of the Freed Voices group (the author’s name has been altered to protect their identity). 'Jose' was detained in Campsfield detention centre. Before I went to detention, I had posters of musicians on my wall. No revolutionaries, or civil rights leaders or anything like that. I think I maybe had a ‘Banksy in [...]
About the Author: Melanie Griffiths is a former COMPAS DPhil student and is currently an ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. She is leading the 'Detention, Deportability and the Family: Migrant Men’s Negotiations of the Right to Respect for Family Life' project, examining the family lives [...]