Questions raised why asylum seekers are being put in prison for weeks before deportation
5th July 2025
The IPRT has criticised the practice, saying that the measure is wrong because it sees people jailed “for administrative reasons, not because they were a suspect or had been convicted of a crime”.
The IPRT’s executive director Saoirse Brady said that the stance of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture was that detention for immigration purposes should be “exceptional, proportionate and decided on a case-by-case basis” to deem if it’s absolutely necessary.
“Prison should always be a sanction of last resort,” Brady said. “Yet we’ve recently seen people detained in prison prior to deportation for administrative reasons, not because they were a suspect or had been convicted of a crime. For this reason, IPRT is concerned that recent developments fly in the face of international human rights standards.”
