Member

In the words of the Jesuit Refugee Service in a report this year, access to legal advice in immigration detention is “becoming an impossibility”. Many sign up for advice but never hear back. Even when they do hear back, the lawyer will often be unable to offer detailed advice of good quality, for understandable capacity reasons. Even if existing schemes provide free legal advice to the minority who can access them, the experience of practitioners and NGOs suggests that the schemes too often fail to provide ongoing representation after that initial 30 minutes—for example, in supporting a person to bring an appeal in a tribunal where a decision against them has been unlawful. Even worse is that even when a person is not detained in either an IRC or a prison, there is no specific government scheme at all to provide free immigration legal advice. For example, those detained in short-term holding facilities and residential holding rooms are not entitled to the access that others are.