BRITAIN should introduce a 28-day limit on immigration detention to mitigate the “brutality” faced by those indefinitely detained whose lives are being “destroyed,” campaigners said yesterday.

Martha Spurrier, director of civil rights group Liberty, told the BBC Sunday Politics that Britain was the only country in Europe not to place a time limit on immigration detention and that a fixed limit was “the humane and civilised thing to do.”

She added that the “bogeyman idea of a flood of people who are going to go underground” if they are not indefinitely detained “just is not a reality.”