Walls and Witnesses: Detention, Solidarity, and Resistance
- Europe Must Act
- May 27
- 2 min read
To read our report in full, download it in English here:
A report concerning detention, solidarity, and resistance is particularly poignant at this moment in Europe. The EU's New Pact on Migration and Asylum comes into full effect on the 12th June 2026, representing the most significant overhaul of European migration policy in a decade.
The Pact introduces a series of measures designed to accelerate the processing of asylum claims and increase the rate of deportations (often called 'returns'), including mandatory border procedures, expanded use of detention, and a new pre-entry screening system. In practice, this means a substantial expansion of detention and deportation infrastructure across the EU.
This report explores how these policies are already taking shape, and what they mean for the people caught within them, as well as for those who refuse to look away. In Bulgaria, we examine the planned construction of new closed detention centres across the country, and how the State's efforts to site these facilities in small peripheral municipalities is promoting a discourse saturated with fear and the criminalisation of people on the move. In Italy, we look at how the Pact's health screening provisions are previewed by the existing CPR system and how doctors are resisting their involvement in detention structures. We then turn to the detention of minors, a practice the Pact continues to permit despite constituting a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Finally, we examine the criminalisation of solidarity itself: the prosecution of volunteers, activists, and ordinary citizens across Greece and Poland who stepped in where states failed, and who were subsequently treated as criminals for doing so.
Running through all of these cases is a common thread: the policing and criminalisation of human movement, and the framing of asylum seekers as threats rather than as people in need of protection.
But running alongside it is another thread, one of resistance. Courts have acquitted. Doctors have refused. Communities have protested. This report documents both, ultimately reminding us that we have the power to resist.
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