ABSTRACT
This chapter critically explores the justifications, scope and limits of immigration detention in Australia and the United Kingdom and makes a distinctive contribution to the developing preventive justice scholarship alongside the established studies focused on criminal law/procedure and counter-terrorism. It examines how conventional, public law-based, constraints on executive action are absent, ineffective or present in attenuated forms in this regulatory space. Without orthodox and effective checks and balances that promote substantive and procedural justice, protracted and even indefinite periods of detention for many protection seekers have eventuated. This chapter has examined a particular form of preventive justice: immigration detention for protection seekers. These detainees are held for general preventive and/or administrative purposes, often in circumstances where they have not committed crimes. Rather, protection seekers' incarceration stems from their irregular movement and border crossings and concomitant 'unauthorised' status under municipal laws. Their confinement may persist for months, years even, pending entry-related decisions or removal, deportation or exclusion.
