Betwixt and Between: Turin's CIE - A Human Rights Investigation into Turin's Immigration Detention Centre

Around the world, political policies about immigration detention are controversial topics, which are often linked to the political and economic environment of the day. Contributing to this debate, the present report investigates the extent to which Italian, European and international human rights and migration law is applied in Turin's Centre of Identification and Expulsion (CIE) - an immigration detention centre in northern Italy - while situating its significance in terms of the wider economic, social and political context of migration policy. This study was motivated by the fact that a number of institutions and organisations at local, national and international level have expressed concern about the current praxis of administrative detention of irregular migrants in Italy. The inconsistency between the explicit and implicit aims of immigration detention centres is of particular concern, because it gives rise to a situation that is a fertile ground for abuse, inefficiencies and shocking human rights violations. In order to evaluate the application of human rights law in Turin's CIE, the CIE Research Project considers both individual and systemic problems faced by detainees, their families and people who have direct contact with the centre in a professional or voluntary capacity. These problems are analysed in terms of the conditions of detention as well as the judicial and legal processes that surround immigration detention. This report concludes by presenting a list of seventeen specific problems that were identified as obstructing the full, practical and accessible implementation of human rights law and EU law,both inside Turin's CIE, and in terms of the related Italian judicial and administrative procedures.