Event Durham

This three-day international conference brings together leading scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to explore the complex intersections between the international transfer of prisoners, the rehabilitation of offenders, and the evolving legal and political landscape shaped by Brexit, and the intersection between migration management and the transnational administration of criminal justice.

Across six panels, and a keynote, the conference firstly explores how foreign national offenders experience rehabilitation, questioning how academic definitions, as well as domestic and international policies, align with the lived realities of people facing linguistic, cultural, legal, and social barriers. It further aim to examines domestic and international extradition and repatriation laws, assessing whether international and domestic legal frameworks truly prioritise rehabilitation, and how Brexit reshapes cross‑border justice. Finally, the conference explores what contributions the scholarship on “crimmigration” – intended as the scholarship which looks at how immigration control increasingly operates through penal logics, which in turn disproportionately impact racialised and marginalised groups - can make to the debates on transfers. Empirical research from Poland and the UK grounds these debates in practice, revealing how transfer mechanisms function on the ground. The conference concludes with a roundtable of academics, and practitioners to synthesise insights and consider how research can shape policy and public debate. Overall, the aim of the conference is to bridge scholarship and practice, situating international transfers within wider questions of justice, mobility, and inequality to encourage more humane approaches to criminal justice in post‑Brexit Europe. 

Registration is free of charge. For any further information, please contact Irene Wieczorek

Conference Information