Detained and Dismissed

Human Rights Watch has just published a detailed report on Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention. Immigration detention facilities are black holes all around the world. For one thing it is difficult to understand or explain why a state should imprison somebody who has committed no crime at all. At least for those who tend to consider existing as a right and not as a crime. HRW writes that in the United States

the number of individuals held in administrative detention while their immigration cases are determined has skyrocketed in recent years. The detained population on any given day is now over 29,000 nationwide, up almost 50 percent from 2005.

And according to the report the overshadowing sanitary problems for women in this condition are

delays and denials of testing and treatment, obstacles to obtaining medical care, distortions in the doctor-patient relationship, detrimental and unnecessary use of restraints and strip searches, discontinuity of care, lack of effective remedies.

Wednesday, 18 March 2009

• Email: Francesco.Bailo@uts.edu.au

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