Immigration Detention and Human Rights

Book excerpt: Practices of immigration detention are largely resistant to conventional forms of legal correction because contemporary liberal democracies justify these practices with an appeal to their territorial sovereignty, a concept that thwarts the very communicability of individual interests in modern constitutionalism. However, this book argues that human rights in the specific context of immigration detention can function as “destabilisation rights”, subjecting to full legal scrutiny those claims that the national state presents as predominantly based on its territorial sovereignty. The resulting destabilisation of territorial sovereignty in both domestic and international constitutionalism will have ramifications for a number of instruments of migration control, the perceived necessity and legitimacy of which is almost exclusively based on the self-referential notion of territorial sovereignty.