Read the Annual Report here
The Medical Justice Financial Year ending 31st January 2025 Annual Report shows how we changed lives and made detention less harmful. Thank you for making it possible. You can download the report here.
In 2024, inspectors warned of the worst conditions they have ever found in immigration removal centres (IRCs) where detained people continue to be at imminent risk.
20,604 men, women and children were held in detention in 2024. The situation remains urgent – this report details how Medical Justice continues to evidence the severe harm caused to detained clients by the catastrophic failures in safeguards that have led to inhuman and degrading treatment.
In 2024, rather than change direction and strengthen safeguards, the new Labour government continued the previous government’s moves to weaken safeguards and to expand detention, in full knowledge of the severe harm this risks – harm that cannot be described as accidental.
Changing lives
- 508 referrals for detained people in 2024 – some say we changed the course of their lives.
- 90% of a set of 73 clients assessed by Medical Justice clinicians and received a medio-legal report were released.
Secured systemic lasting change making detention less harmful for thousands of people
- Released: research report “You’ll see the outside when you’re in Rwanda” – analysis of harm caused to 48 clients detained for removal to Rwanda. 82% were torture survivors. 78% had suicidal thoughts. All 48 were released.
- Established: duty to consult Medical Justice on detention policies affecting vulnerable people – our successful litigation means the Home Office must engage constructively with us, and receive our evidence and suggestions for improvements, which, if adopted, potentially benefit thousands of detained people.
- Secured: improvements to clinical safeguards for thousands of detained people each year – including Home Office Rule 35 training for IRC clinicians, NHS England guidance on Rule 35 safeguarding reports and Adults at Risk Statutory Guidance.
- Galvanised: Medical Justice evidence quoted by the Royal College of Psychiatrists – our research, analysis and case-studies used in the report “Protecting the mental health of people seeking sanctuary in the UK’s evolving legislative landscape”, covered by the British Medical Journal and galvanising the medical community.
Clearly these achievements in FY2025 are stepping stones. Our ultimate vision is that immigration detention is unable to harm anybody’s physical or mental health as it no longer exists in the UK. Certainly, this is a long-term endeavour, and it cannot come about without the stepping stones we are laying down now.
One of the most significant systems changes to make the immigration and asylum system more humane is to end the mistreatment of people held indefinitely in immigration detention. That is unlikely to happen without medical evidence of the harm. Medical Justice is the only source of such medical evidence as it is the only charity to send clinicians to see detained people in all the UK’s IRCs, to document the harm they suffer, to analyse and to present the evidence in a digested format to use in our own advocacy work for system change and by like-minded groups. Medical Justice is recognised as the UK’s expert on deterioration of detained people’s health, with extensive and uncontested evidence of how and why dysfunctional clinical safeguards severely harm detained people.
Medical Justice is a critical actor in the required collaboration of organisations and voices. In 2024, we galvanised the influential voice of the medical community and primed parliamentarians to act by bringing them together with experts, lawyers, detention monitoring bodies, and people with lived experience through the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Immigration Detention for which we act as the secretariat.
We thank all our partners, clients and funders for their invaluable support.
