How Long a Removal Centre Can Hold You — the ceiling, the monthly review and the judge who can end it

Article 57/3 states the rule in one sentence: the period of administrative detention in removal centres cannot exceed six months. The extension is written narrowly. That period may be extended by a maximum of six further months where the removal proceedings could not be completed because of the foreign national's failure to cooperate, or failure to give correct information or documents about his country. There is no third period in the article.

Read the extension ground closely, because it is about your conduct and not about the administration's difficulties. A consulate that takes months to issue a travel document, a file that sits unread, a route that no airline flies: none of those is a failure by you to give correct information about your own country. The distinction is plain on paper and is regularly lost in practice, because the person who has to make it is the person locked inside the centre.

Article 57/8 sits next to it. The electronic and communication devices of a detained foreign national may be examined in order to establish nationality, and the data obtained may not be used for any other purpose. Identity is what a seventh month of detention is for, and it is being worked on with or without you.

The clock starts earlier than most people assume. Under Article 57/1, where a person within Article 54 is apprehended by law enforcement, the governorate is notified at once and the assessment and decision period cannot exceed forty-eight hours. Under Article 57/2, once a detention decision is taken, the law enforcement unit that made the apprehension takes the person to a removal centre within forty-eight hours. Article 58 provides that foreign nationals under administrative detention are held in those centres.

The six-month figure is the outer limit of what may happen, not a period the administration is entitled to use up. Article 57/4 requires the governorate to assess regularly, every month, whether there is still a necessity for detention to continue. Where it is considered necessary, the thirty-day period is not waited for. Where continued detention is not necessary, detention is terminated immediately, and alternative obligations under Article 57/A are imposed on those foreign nationals instead.

That paragraph is why most files end well before the ceiling, and it is also the one that is easiest to let pass unnoticed. It produces a document every month. Article 57/5 provides that the detention decision, the extension of the detention period, and the results of the monthly assessments are served, together with their reasons, on the foreign national or his legal representative or his lawyer. Where he is not represented by a lawyer, he or his legal representative is informed of the result, the objection procedures and the time limits.

Article 57/A lists what replaces detention: residence at a designated address, reporting obligations, family-based return, return counselling, voluntary work in services of public benefit, a security deposit, and electronic monitoring. Under Article 57/A-3, where a person falls within Article 57/2 but is not taken into detention, imposing one or more of those obligations is mandatory. Several of them depend on things only people outside the centre can produce, which is why relatives abroad end up doing the practical work; what a family can and cannot do from another country is set out in the note on reaching and supporting a detainee from abroad.

Article 57/6 is the only route that can end the detention against the wishes of the administration. The detained person, his legal representative or his lawyer may apply to the sulh ceza judge. The application does not stop the detention. Where the petition is handed to the administration, it must be forwarded to the competent judge immediately. The judge concludes the examination within five days, and the decision is final.

The word final is where people stop reading, and it is not the end of the sentence. The same paragraph provides that the detained person, his legal representative or his lawyer may apply to the sulh ceza judge again on the ground that the conditions for detention have ceased to exist or have changed. The first refusal cannot be appealed. It can be overtaken. A review at month four giving the same reason as month one, a travel document that has since been issued, a medical report, an address someone will vouch for: each of those is a change in the conditions, and each grounds a fresh application.

Article 57/7 removes the usual reason for not making one. A person who takes the judicial route against a detention measure and cannot meet lawyer's fees is provided with legal services under Law no. 1136 on request.

One boundary matters. The sulh ceza judge decides whether you are held, not whether you leave. The removal decision itself goes to the administrative court within seven days of service under Article 53/3, as amended in November 2024; the court concludes the application within fifteen days of the file being complete, its decision is final, and the foreign national is not removed within the period for bringing that action or while it is pending, unless he consents. The two files run side by side, and the second one is explained on the page on deportation decisions and entry bans.

Article 57 is not the only timetable that can apply to you, and the differences between them are large.

Two of those deserve a comment. The twenty-four months in Article 57/A-2 is longer than the detention ceiling itself, which surprises people who are offered alternative obligations as though they were a brief arrangement. They are not brief. They are supervised, and they are outside the centre — which is the point of them.

The thirty days in Article 68/5 belongs to a different situation altogether. Article 68/1 provides that applicants for international protection cannot be placed in administrative detention for the sole reason that they made an application, and Article 68/2 calls detention of an applicant an exceptional measure, available only on four listed grounds: serious doubt about identity or nationality, prevention of irregular entry at a border gate, the impossibility of establishing the basis of the application otherwise, and serious danger to public order or public security. Where detention does apply, Article 68/5 caps it at thirty days and Article 68/7 gives the same five-day route to the sulh ceza judge.

Which article governs the detention, which limb of Article 54 the removal decision rests on, and what the last monthly review actually said are three separate questions, and none of them can be answered from outside the file. How removal centres work in full, from the first forty-eight hours to release, is set out on the page on removal centres and administrative detention.