Singer, ‘“Desert Island” Detention: Understandings of ‘Law’ in the UK’s Immigration Detention System’, 2019

Sarah Singer, ‘Desert Island’ Detention: Detainees’ Understandings of ‘Law’ in the UK’s Immigration Detention System, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 1, March 2019, Pages 1–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdy020

Abstract
This research draws on interviews conducted with asylum-seekers detained in Immigration Removal Centres in a number of locations across the United Kingdom, and explores how they, as subjects, perceive and experience immigration law. What is revealed is that individuals’ experience of law is largely influenced by a variety of non-legal factors which lawyers may not readily engage with on a regular basis. Law here appears to manifest as rumour and suggestion rather than a definitive set of rules and procedures, and is perceived as being coloured by lies and deception on the part of the various stakeholders involved. Participants display differing modes of legal consciousness, in which their experiences of “law” blur with their everyday experiences inside and outside the detention estate. Many present themselves concurrently as passive victims of an unjust and inaccessible system, and equally as active, knowledgeable legal subjects, in seemingly contradictory ways. Permeating all these narratives is the description of immigration detention as a “desert island”, a space that is isolated and remote, and imbued with uncertainty and often fear, a space which appears to be outside the jurisdiction of “law” as lawyers would readily understand it.