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The NGO Medical Justice released this week its report on the consequences that detention may have on the pregnancy of detained women. The report shows that, although migrant pregnant women are detained with a view to their removal, only 5% of those held in one particular detention centre in the UK in 2011 were successfully removed. It also finds that the healthcare these women received in detention was inadequate and that asylum seeking women have poorer health outcomes during and after childbirth than others.

The applicant, from Mogadishu (Somalia), sought asylum in Sweden in April 2009, allegedly to escape persecution by al-Shabaab, an Islamist group in Somalia. He claimed to have been persecuted for working with the American Friends Service Community from 1992 to 2005, including by way of threatening telephone calls telling him to stop spreading Christianity. After five interviews with the Swedish Migration Board, and an oral hearing before the Swedish Migration Court, the applicant's asylum claim was rejected, on grounds of vagueness and lack of credibility.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention visited Greece from 21 January to 31 January. In its end-of-mission statement, the Group underlines several flaws in Greece's detention policies, in particular regarding asylum seekers. The Group notes that disproportionately long detention of asylum seekers with no application of alternatives and in absence of effective judicial review may be considered as arbitrary. Moreover, the Group considers that detention as long as 18 months (which is the maximum in Greece for asylum seekers) in deficient conditions may amount to unwarranted punishment.

The case concerns a couple of Palestinians who were recognised as refugees by the UNRWA. In 2003 they were forced to leave the refugee camp where they used to live in Jordan owing to a conflict with a local family, and went to France. They applied for asylum, but their claims were rejected by the French Asylum Office.