This special website of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) - Europe is dedicated to asylum seekers and irregular migrants in administrative detention in Europe.

Those persons who are looking for protection or for ways of trying to survive by undeclared work are literally locked up and guarded as if they were criminal prisoners, and very often their living conditions in detention are even worse than living conditions in criminal prisons.

JRS staff in Europe visit and accompany many of these detainees and, building on that experience, JRS in Europe and the Brussels office of JRS-Europe plead their cause.

Against that background this website evolved. Its purpose is to inform, to raise awareness and to nourish critical as well as constructive debate.

JRS is a global Catholic organisation, founded in 1980 with the mission to accompany and to serve refugees and other forcibly displaced people regardless of their religious affiliations and to defend their rights.

JRS-Europe has launched its new research project on detention conditions, "The DEVAS Project".  For more information, go to www.jrseurope.org/DEVAS/intro.htm

Website last updated on: 02/07/2009

For more information about the work of the JRS-Europe office in Brussels and JRS in Europe visit: www.jrseurope.org.