Community-Based Alternatives to Immigration Detention

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum speeds up the expansion of immigration detention across Europe. This policy paper advocates for community-centred alternatives to detention (ATD) as a more humane, less costly, and equally, if not more, effective alternative to achieving migration governance outcomes.

The authors from International Detention Coalition (IDC) draw on global and European evidence, including pilot programmes in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Poland and Belgium, to demonstrate that ATD work — and can be scaled.

High compliance rates and prevention of harm

1. Immigration detention causes serious, documented harm to physical and mental health, with disproportionate impacts on children, women and gender-diverse people.

2. Community-based ATD achieve compliance rates of 70–99%, consistently outperforming coercive approaches.

3. ATD cost a fraction of detention, freeing resources for case management and legal support that drive case resolution.

4. Case management, the cornerstone of effective ATD, builds trust and informed participation that lead to durable outcomes for both migrants and governments.

5. Promising national practices in Belgium, Spain, France and Ireland show that rights-respecting migration governance is viable and replicable across the EU.

Europe has a choice

The expansion of immigration detention across Europe is a political choice, not a political necessity. It is costly, harmful and ineffective. Rights-based, community-centred ATD offer a credible, tested and humane path forward, one that achieves the outcomes governments claim to seek while upholding the rights and dignity of everyone in the migration process. 

The evidence is clear. The models exist. What is needed now is the political commitment to reduce and ultimately end reliance on immigration detention by building rights-based migration systems.

Read more about ATD in our policy brief below. For more information, please contact Tobias.Beylat(at)fes.de.