Brussels (Brussels Morning) – A partnership of four non-profits with 19 visitors engages with detainees in Belgium’s six detention centres, highlighting significant systemic issues. MOVE reported mental health crises, transparency issues, and unlawful detentions, advocating for systemic reforms and opposing expansion plans.
The partnership consists of four non-profit organisations and has 19 visitors who talk to detainees across Belgium’s six detention centres. The centres exist to accommodate people who will eventually be expelled. However, in many cases, deportation is lawfully impossible, or migrants come from nations that refuse to take them back. These facts reveal a significant paradox at the heart of the system.
How Are Mental Health Issues Impacting Detainees in Belgium?
MOVE examined 794 people in 2023, denoting less than 16% of the 4,915 people currently incarcerated. In 2023, the coalition reported grave mental health issues across the board. It also drew a lookout to the system’s lack of transparency, as well as the necessity to end the incarceration of individuals who cannot be deported.
“Between 30-40% of people detained are discharged again. The Immigration Office understands it is impossible to deport them,” Marijn Sillis, communications manager for MOVE, said. “People endure months of trauma for no reason. [The system] is totally useless.”
Why Is MOVE Advocating for Reforms in Detention Centers?
People are transferred to detention centres when they are incapable of producing papers during police checks (asylum seekers are also imprisoned upon arrival at the airport). Some of the people who undergo these checks are non-white individuals living precariously on the street and are often already undergoing mental health issues. Erratic behaviour therefore quickly draws police attention.
For this reason, “people who are already very vulnerable are more at risk of detention,” Sillis demonstrated. Once inside, “they are put in a cell where they languish, and some even go non-verbal. Anyone else would be brought to a hospital but [because they are undocumented] they are detained.”
How Effective Are Medical Services in Belgium’s Detention Centers?
Stretched medical services have a minor impact on all detainees, whether they are labouring with mental health or not. MOVE hears many depositions of minimal medical care, and staff suspicion that inmates are feigning illness in the hopes of a favourable impact on their case to stay in Belgium. This situation leads many to regard “helpless”.
“They [tell staff], ‘I don’t feel well, I feel depressed. Can I speak to a doctor?’ And there is a feeling that they are only saying it to get out of the centre. But the reality is that they aren’t getting the medical and mental support they need.”
On 24 December 2023, one man passed by suicide in Merksplas detention centre, uncovered on the Dutch border next to Turnhout Prison (Antwerp province). As he was undocumented, authorities were incapable to find and inform his household of his death. He was buried unattended in the Merksplas graveyard this spring. Another suicide appeared in 127bis (near Brussels Airport) in March.
Other prisoners have felt the impact of these events, according to one of MOVE’s visitors: “Some inmates have clearly been scarred by this incident. It frightens them. Everything seems even more desperate.”
MOVE is resolved to underline the illegal nature of many imprisonment cases. For instance, it is legally incomprehensible to deport a woman who is 28 weeks pregnant or more. Visitors met with three pregnant females detained in Holsbeek (Flemish Brabant) in 2023, and although they were beneath the 28-week mark the coalition is against the arrest of vulnerable categories such as pregnant women.
Moreover, MOVE recognised five detainees who were minors in 2021 – another classification that cannot be legally deported. Stateless people are also regularly imprisoned, such as Roma people and Palestinians. In these cases, there is nowhere to transfer them back to. Faced with these essential structural flaws, MOVE is calling on the Federal Government to examine the pre-existing system rather than grow it: plans to spend €100 million on the building of four more centres are already underway.
