Immigration detention in Hong Kong: Advocacy in the dark

This paper examines civil society engagement with immigration detention in Hong Kong. 

Hong Kong administratively detains significant numbers of migrants each year as an immigration control measure. In the years before Covid-19 travel bans were imposed, the number of people who were put in immigration detention was similar to (and sometimes exceeded) the numbers of prisoners in the city.

Chopra shows how the immigration regime in Hong Kong renders low-income migrants vulnerable to exclusion, detention, and removal from the city. She also shows that immigration detention is shrouded in a striking lack of transparency relative to other forms of state custody.

Drawing upon semi-structured qualitative interviews with migrant-serving and refugee-serving civil society organisations, Chopra explores how differently positioned groups engage with detained migrants and the detention system. She identifies whether and how these groups advocate for detention reform. She then considers how recent legal and political shifts in Hong Kong have affected civil society engagement with immigration detention. While her paper will be work in progress, she aims to identify civil society adaptations to an increasingly securitised political and legal environment. In so doing, she reflects upon how social mobilization and policy advocacy for vulnerable groups evolves in an increasingly authoritarian political context.

Biography: 

Surabhi Chopra is the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London and Research Fellow, Centre for Criminology, University of Hong Kong. She is a human rights scholar researching hate crimes, human rights remedies, and the regulation of migration across multiple Asian states.

She led the first study of administrative detention of migrants in Hong Kong (Immigration Detention and Vulnerable Migrants in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Research Grants Council Impact Fund). Project findings led to a first-of-its-kind data repository on detention in Hong Kong, as well as a range of digital and print resources on immigration detention for migrants and CSOs. She has been invited by the Constitutional Court of South Korea, and the Commission of Human Rights of the Philippines among others to advise on redress for hate crimes and other human rights violations.