ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY
4 April: Libyan authorities, funded by the EU and Italy to prevent migrants embarking for Europe, accuse aid groups including MSF, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the UNHCR, of seeking to change the country’s ethnic makeup by encouraging sub-Saharan African migrants to settle there, which the internal security spokesman says is a ‘hostile act’. Some groups are ordered to close their offices. (BBC, 4 April 2025)
6 April: Marine Le Pen denounces the recent judicial decision concerning her party’s embezzlement of EU funds, that bans her from standing in the next French presidential election, calling it a witch-hunt which she will fight and comparing herself to Martin Luther King. The far-right National Rally demonstrates in Paris and the judges who convicted her receive death threats. (Guardian, 6 April 2025; Al Jazeera, 7 April 2025)
7 April: The European People’s Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, adopts a tough new position paper on migration, including boosting Frontex’s capacity and deploying its agents in African countries; more partnerships with third countries to prevent departures; temporary suspension of access to asylum; and tougher family reunion rules for refugees. (EuroNews, 7 April 2025)
7 April: Writing to the prime minister in response to his comments before the Organised Crime Immigration Summit, that ‘we all pay the price for insecure borders,’ Together With Refugees, along with 130 refugee and human rights organisations, say he should ‘move away from the hostile politics, racist rhetoric and demonising language ’and not play into the hands of those seeking to divide refugees and communities. (Guardian, 7 April 2025)
We brought over 130 organisations together to call for the end to the racist rhetoric and demonising language of the past.
The Prime Minster must unite our communities for a different way forward.
We need a fair new plan for refugees.
#TogetherWithRefugees
shorturl.at/l4iEb
— Together With Refugees (@refugeestogether.bsky.social) 7 April 2025 at 09:42
7 April: Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán announces that the country will leave the International Criminal Court after hosting Benjamin Netanyahu and refusing to act on the ICC’s arrest warrant for war crimes. Other European countries including France, Italy, Poland, Romania and Germany have said they will not enforce the warrant. (UK Human Rights Blog, 7 April 2025)
9 April: Researchers warn that conservative think tanks in the US, like the Heritage Foundation, are strengthening their influence in Germany with the CDU/SCU Foreign Policy Working Group, also working with the Polish organisation Ordo Iuris to target EU institutions. (Research Against Global Authoritarianism, 5 April 2025)
10 April: Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch approves local deals with the hard-right Reform party while ruling out a national agreement to unite the Right. (Morning Star, 10 April 2025)
13 April: In municipal and county council elections in Finland, mostly fought on issues of government cuts and public debt, the far-right Finns party’s share of the vote (7.8 percent) drops 3.3 percent from 2022 results. (YLE, 13 April 2025)
14 April: UN experts call on the Italian government to rescind an emergency decree that allowed the government to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and enact a new security bill that breaches international human rights standards, impacts disproportionately on racial minorities, migrants and refugees and introduces crimes of ‘revolt’ in places of detention. (OHCHR, 14 April 2025)
ANTI-FASCISM AND THE FAR RIGHT
With anti-migrant, anti-Muslim, anti-equalities, anti-abortion, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQI activities increasingly interlinking, we now incorporate information on the Christian Right as well as the religious Right generally.
4 April: Members of German neo-Nazi group the Saxon Separatists, accused of plotting a far-right uprising and ethnic cleansing, reportedly conducted paramilitary training with live ammunition in Poland and the Czech Republic. Authorities arrest eight members and classify the group as a domestic terrorist organisation. (TVP World, 4 April 2025)
5 April: Following a solidarity rally with US campaigners in front of the Tesla showrooms in Berlin, Germany, a demonstrator who showed a photograph of Musk’s controversial salute during the CPAC Conference is placed under investigation for possible violation of the ban on showing Nazi symbols. (Research Against Global Authoritarianism, 5 April 2025).
7 April: In Duisburg, North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany, several schools are closed after receiving ‘threatening and right-wing extremist statements’. (Deutsche Welle, 7 April 2025).
8 April: French anti-racist organisation SOS Racisme files a legal complaint against the far-right Luminis Paris for distributing flyers near a Marine Le Pen rally showing a bloodied knife and urging French people to ‘fight back’ against foreigners. (Times Union, 8 April 2025)
8 April: An analysis reveals how the far Right is using idealised images of thin European women to normalise its ideology, with women playing an increasingly important role in recruitment. (Open Democracy, 8 April 2025)
10 April: A NEVER AGAIN Association report details the public and parliamentarians’ support for, and the far-right cult around, Janusz Walus since his return to Poland in 2024 after completing his prison sentence for the murder of anti-apartheid activist Chris Hani. (Never Again Association, 10 April 2025)
13 April: Far-right group Fighting Justice Against Predators, known for spreading false claims about refugees online, is confronted by anti-racist campaigners during a rally in Paisley. Denied access to protest outside an asylum hotel, the group gathers in the town’s plaza, where they are met with a counter-demonstration. (Morning Star, 13 April 2025)
POLICING| PRISONS| CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
6 April: At the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings, more than 100 relatives of people who have died after contact with the police announce the first ever class-action lawsuit launched in the UK in pursuit of compensation and justice and directed at police officers, police chiefs and government departments. (Guardian, 6 April 2025)
8 April: As the Labour Party seems likely to break its promise to implement the ‘Hillsborough Law’ in full, INQUEST publishes a report entitled ‘All or Nothing’ calling on behalf of families for no retreat from the commitment to implement an enforceable ‘duty of candour’ on public authorities. (Guardian, 8 April 2025)
Today & every day we remember the 97 people killed in the Hillsborough disaster.
We stand in solidarity with their families & the survivors who have been leading the fight for justice for 36 years.
A full Hillsborough Law must be their legacy to ensure that the failures are never again repeated.
— INQUEST (@inquest-org.bsky.social) 15 April 2025 at 12:28
8 April: Ministry of Justice figures reveal that imprisoned children in England spend an average of 20 hours per day in their cells and are often denied the mandated minimum 15 hours of education each week. (Morning Star, 8 April 2025)
8 April: Campaigners describe as ‘chilling and dystopian’ a secret Ministry of Justice project using the personal data of hundreds of thousands of people, including victims of crime, to predict potential killers, amid fears that the data builds in bias against minority-ethnic and poor people. (Statewatch, 8 April 2025)
The UK Ministry of Justice’s “murder prediction” tool isn’t the only algorithmic system profiling people as future criminals.
The MoJ is also using an AI system to assess the ‘risk’ of re-offending—profiling over 1,300 people every day.
Read more:
buff.ly/zpzIYrX— Statewatch (@statewatch.bsky.social) 10 April 2025 at 16:04
9 April: A Ministry of Justice ‘risk of re-offending’ AI-based system assessed over 1300 prisoners and people on probation every day in January 2025, Statewatch reveals, despite the known risks of racial bias in such prediction tools. (Statewatch, 9 April 2025)
9 April: In France, a 76 -year-old pensioner who shared a guillotine photograph of the (female) president of the Paris Criminal Court, responsible for convicting Marine Le Pen, with the words, ‘what this Bitch deserved,’ is handed an eight-month prison suspended sentence for contempt and incitement to murder. (Le Monde, 9 April 2025)
11 April: A research study supported by the Defender of Rights details the biases in the French police’s use of ‘public space eviction’ strategies against young men of sub-Saharan and North African origin. (Le Monde, 11 April 2025)
11 April: Met police plans to install the UK’s first permanent live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon face objections from local councillors on the grounds of disproportionality and over-policing of certain communities. Over half the 180 deployments of LFR in 2024 were in areas where the proportion of Black residents is higher than the city’s average, including Lewisham and Haringey. (Computer Weekly, 11 April 2025)
13 April: Home Office data show a rise of 13 percent in use-of-force reports (total 747,396) by police forces in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024. Women were the subject of 18 percent of incidents, with Black women making up about 9 percent of the total despite making up just 4 percent of the population. (Observer, 13 April 2025)
14 April: The Home Affairs Select Committee report into the summer 2024 riots finds that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are baseless; that the police’s response to 246 protests, counter-protests and incidents of disorder was ‘entirely appropriate’; and concludes that police forces failed to anticipate the disorder due to gaps in intelligence linked to social media and the dark web. (Guardian, 14 April 2025)
14 April: After the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands files a formal complaint about a pro-Palestine student occupation of its administrative headquarters, riot police end the occupation and use batons to disperse a crowd of supporters, with approval from the city mayor. (Dutch News, 14 April 2025; Netherlands Times, 14 April 2025).
14 April: In Berlin, Germany, a Syrian man is fatally shot by police as he attempts to flee the scene of a fatal stabbing at an underground station. (Deutsche Welle, 14 April 2025)
16 April: FOI requests reveal that Muslim prisoners are more likely to be subjected to the use of force in prison including batons, rigid handcuffs and stress positions. (Guardian, 16 April 2025)
NATIONAL SECURITY AND ANTI-TERRORISM
10 April: Riverway Law files an application to the home secretary on behalf of Hamas under section 4 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to remove it from the list of proscribed organisations. Shadow home secretary Robert Jenrick describes the law firm’s involvement as ‘sickening’, adding that ‘it’s no surprise’ as ‘this firm specialises in immigration cases’. (X, [Fahad Ansari], 10 April 2025; Law Gazette, 10 April 2025)
ASYLUM | MIGRATION| BORDERS| CITIZENSHIP
Asylum and migrant rights
3 April: Ukrainian refugees in Peterborough whose current permission expires in 28 days or less are told they can apply to stay for a further 18 months under the Ukraine Permission Extension scheme, as the council uses unspent portions of £1.6m in government funding ring-fenced for Ukrainian refugees. (BBC, 3 April 2025)
3 April: A briefing by the Helen Bamber Foundation reveals how the government’s classification of Albania as a ‘safe’ country undermines asylum claims and puts trafficking survivors at risk, as it is a major source country for trafficking victims: men and boys for forced labour or criminal activities, and women and girls for sexual exploitation. (EIN, 3 April 2025)
3 April: Migrants Organise and other migrant rights groups produce a report, Threadbare: the quality of immigration legal aid, highlighting the combined impact of the destruction of publicly funded legal services and of hostile environment policies. (EIN, 7 April 2025)
🚀NEW REPORT🚀
❗This week we launched a new report highlighting how the crisis in legal aid is leaving people without good quality legal advice at a time when they need it most.
➡️ Access it here www.migrantsorganise.org/new-report-t…
— Migrants Organise (@migrantsorganise.bsky.social) 3 April 2025 at 12:03
4 April: In response to an FOI request, the Home Office reveals that it spent over £22,000 (excluding the costs of Home Office staff and legal advisers) to prevent publication of an internal report, The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal, which describes how ‘the British empire depended on a racist ideology in order to function’ and how immigration laws are designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population. (Guardian, 4 April 2025)
4 April: The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees calls on the government to strengthen family reunion and resettlement schemes and to pilot a humanitarian visa scheme for people coming from Sudan and Eritrea, as resettlement schemes meant to take at least 5,000 refugees annually only resettled 435 people in the year to September 2024 and family reunion applications face an 11,000 backlog. (Independent, 4 April 2025)
9 April: An 8-year-old UK-born child wins his challenge to the Home Office’s refusal of indefinite leave to remain for inability to afford the fee. The judge rules unlawful the failure to consider the child’s welfare as a primary consideration. (Free Movement, 14 April 2025)
9 April: Hours before the hearing of a legal challenge, the Home Office says it will process the asylum claims of the thousands of people left in limbo after the previous government’s Rwanda policy was scrapped. (Guardian, 9 April 2025)
9 April: The Home Office is accused of milking the immigration system for cash as analysis of new visa fees reveals that total costs for a partner on a ten-year settlement route are £20,000, unaffordable for low-wage couples. (The I paper, 11 April 2025; Reunite Families, 20 March 2025)
11 April: The Home Office announces a new £1.5m fund to provide community advocacy support to help victims of the Windrush scandal obtain compensation, while rejecting campaigners’ calls for legal support in making claims. (Free Movement, 14 April 2025)
12 April: Official figures reveal a drop of 37 percent in applications for work, study and family visas, from 1.24 million to 772,000, in the year to March 2025, reflecting restrictions in force in early 2024. Health and care worker visa applications fell by 78 percent. (Independent, 12 April 2025)
Borders and internal control
6 April: Freedom From Torture raises concerns over an ‘ill-defined’ clause in the Border, Security and Immigration Bill that criminalises anyone who ‘did an act that caused, or created a risk of, the death of, or serious personal injury to, another person,’ which could result in parents seeking safety with their children being punished rather than protected. (Independent, 6 April 2025)
9 April: The Migrants Rights Network says that eight artificial intelligence towers along the south-east coast of England, procured under a three-year, £16 million contract with US defence company Anduril to enable the detection of small boats in a nine-mile radius, contribute to migrant deaths in the English Channel by pushing people to take more dangerous routes. (MRN, 9 April 2025; Computer Weekly, 11 April 2025)
9 April: Egypt signs a police cooperation deal with Europol, the EU police agency, to prevent and combat serious crime including migrant smuggling. (Europol, 9 April 2025; EU Observer, 10 April 2025)
Reception and detention
2 April: An Amnesty International report accuses Belgium of a policy refusal to provide accommodation for asylum seekers, which also blocks their access to health care and work, despite over 12,000 court rulings, causing extreme suffering. (Brussels Times, 3 April 2025)
3 April: The Home Office announces that it will not be using Wates House in Fareham, Hampshire, to house asylum seekers. Former home secretary Suella Braverman had previously urged the local council to purchase the property to stop asylum seekers being housed there. (BBC, 4 April 2025)
4 April: Tunisian authorities, who receive EU funding to stop migrant departures, begin dismantling makeshift camps in olive groves housing around 20,000 sub-Saharan migrants. (France 24, 5 April 2025)
6 April: Stay Belvedere Hotels, subcontracted by Clearsprings Ready Homes, whose accommodation contract with the Home Office has been cancelled, have failed to make outstanding payments to provider hotels, who say without payment they will have to evict the asylum seekers in their accommodation. (Standard, 6 April 2025)
7 April: A pregnant women, a child whose age is recorded as five years older than he was, and a teenage victim of torture and trafficking, are among a group of 250 people held at Manston holding centre between June and November 2022, when it was grossly overcrowded and struggling with infectious diseases, who sue the government for unlawful detention and breaches of their rights. (Guardian, 7 April 2025)
7 April: Three young migrants are acquitted on appeal of setting fire to the overcrowded Moria refugee camp on Lesvos, Greece, in September 2020, after spending three and a half years in prison. (BBC News, 7 April 2025)
10 April: The uncle of 16-year-old Syrian refugee Ahmad Mamdouh Al Ibrahim, who was fatally stabbed in Huddersfield town centre a week ago, says he had been in the town for only two weeks and was being shown around by his cousin to help him make friends. He praises the local community for leaving flowers at the scene and raising over £10,000 to repatriate Ahmad’s body. (Guardian, 10 April 2025)
10 April: Malta’s constitutional court rules that the state violated the rights of nine asylum seekers who were held offshore on a tourist boat in ‘degrading’ conditions after arriving during the Covid pandemic, and were then transferred to onshore detention without reasons for being detained. (Malta Independent, 10 April 2025)
10 April: The Advocate-General of the Court of Justice of the EU states that Ireland must house asylum seekers, and cannot use the excuse of a ‘mass influx’ to avoid its reception responsibilities. (RTÉ, 10 April 2025)
11 April: The government announces its intention to clear hundreds of asylum seekers from hotels near Windsor and in the west Midlands, which have been targets of far-right racist agitation. (Guardian, 11 April 2025)
Deportations
2 April: Foreign secretary David Lammy visits the western Balkans to ratify a ‘co-operation agreement’ with Serbia. (Standard, 2 April 2025)
2 April: Human rights organisations accuse the EU of complicity in abuse after up to 600 migrants intercepted at sea by Tunisian forces on 17 March disappeared; at least 200 were put on buses, beaten, handcuffed, stripped of their belongings and abandoned in the desert near Algeria; and another group of mostly Sudanese nationals, were deported to the Libyan border. (Info Migrants, 2 April 2025)
5 April: An Afghan woman who fled the Taliban after working with western governments to train and mentor women in Afghanistan is told by the Home Office that she faces no danger and is refused asylum, despite Human Rights Watch reporting deteriorating treatment of girls and women in Afghanistan. Recent data shows that the Home Office rejected the claims of 26 Afghan women in the last 3 months of 2024. (Guardian, 5 April 2025)
11 April: Italy transfers 40 refused asylum seekers to its detention centres in Albania, repurposed as a ‘return hub’ after the courts rejected off-shoring for the processing of asylum claims. (Info Migrants, 14 April 2025)
EDUCATION
Although we do not cover student protests for Palestine, we do track university administrative measures that deny the right to protest and authorise the use of force, or silence pro-Palestinian voices and display anti-Palestinian bias.
2 April: The Reporting and Information Center for Antiziganism in Germany, publishes ‘Antiziganism in the educational sector’, criticising teachers in secondary and daycare settings for failing to intervene to prevent bullying and physical attacks on Sinti and Roma students. (Deutsche Welle, 2 April 2025)
6 April: The University of Glasgow is accused of suppressing dissent after final-year sociology student Neve Mclean is banned from campus for her pro-Palestinian actions. (Morning Star, 6 April 2025)
9 April: After the Met police announce the transfer of 371 ‘safer schools’ officers into neighbourhood police teams, 15 secondary heads in north-east London, coordinated by the Waltham Forest Secondary Heads Group, write to say that the measure puts London schools at risk of ‘increased violence’ and ‘gang exploitation’. (Sky News, 9 April 2025)
14 April: In north Cyprus, thousands of Turkish Cypriots and trades unionists protest outside parliament against a new law authorising the wearing of the hijab by secondary school students in school, vowing to light fires outside parliament throughout the month. (Cyprus Mail, 14 April 2025)
HOUSING| POVERTY| WELFARE
8 April: Survivors of torture face destitution through the planned cuts to personal independence payments (PIP), which is a lifeline for refugees living with long-term physical and mental health conditions, Freedom from Torture warns. (Yorkshire Bylines, 8 April 2025)
HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
10 April: A report by the National AIDS Trust and the One Voice Network finds that GPs are providing inadequate care for Black people living with HIV. Almost a fifth of survey respondents said they avoided going to their GP for fear of being treated differently because of their HIV status, and a fifth reported judgmental or inappropriate comments or questions from GPs. (Guardian, 10 April 2025)
10 April: According to the largest survey of its kind, over a quarter of women in England live with a serious reproductive health issue, with more than a third (38.1 percent) of Black women surveyed reporting a reproductive condition, compared with 27.7 percent of white women, revealing stark ethnic inequalities in reproductive health. (Guardian, 10 April 2025)
13 April: Campaigners call for an urgent review of NHS maternity charges for migrants after a 34-year-old destitute asylum seeker is billed more than £10,000 for an emergency caesarean section, despite being exempt from charges under the NHS cost recovery programme. (Guardian, 13 April 2025)
15 April: The far-right riots of last summer led to a deterioration in asylum seekers’ mental health, says the Mental Health Foundation in its 2025 report. (Guardian, 15 April 2025)
We need a trauma-informed and person-centred approach to asylum claim processes, housing, education, health and care provision experienced by asylum seekers and refugees.
👉 Read our full report: https://t.co/Kqz78TS9mA #RefugeeWeek pic.twitter.com/pR1V20rsGQ
— Mental Health Foundation (@mentalhealth) June 17, 2024
EMPLOYMENT| EXPLOITATION| INDUSTRIAL ACTION
10 April: Steve Wright, the new leader of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), reveals that internal inquiries have uncovered a rise in racist and bigoted comments from union members, particularly online. Wright attributes this increase to the influence of far-right groups and populist rhetoric, prompting unions to launch a campaign addressing the distortion of facts on immigration and race. (Guardian, 10 April 2025)
CULTURE| MEDIA| SPORT
9 April: A High Court judge rules that Joey Barton’s social media posts about former England footballer Eni Aluko and her family are defamatory. The posts, made in January 2024, accused Aluko’s father of corruption and labelled her a hypocrite, leading to online abuse and threats. (BBC News, 9 April 2025)
10 April: A new JENGbA podcast series, In it Together, examines how the joint enterprise doctrine operates and the impact of race on prosecutions. (JENGbA, 10 April 2025)
The trailer for ‘In It Together’ the #jointenterprise podcast, hosted by actor #MaxinePeake has finally dropped. Full series to be released throughout April. https://t.co/fSyOATfSfb@BBCWomansHour @BBCRadioManc @sounddelivery @felicitygerry @ITNSolicitors @BigIssue @jrf_uk
— JENGbA (@JENGbA) April 3, 2025
14 April: Librarians warn that they are increasingly being asked to remove books from shelves, particularly those with LGBTQ themes, and seeing more vandalism of books and racist and homophobic annotations, as the influence of US ‘anti-woke’ pressure groups spreads. (Guardian, 14 April 2025)
RACIAL VIOLENCE AND HARASSMENT
For details of court judgements on racially motivated and other hate crimes, see also POLICING | PRISONS | CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.
3 April: Glasgow councillors demand action on ‘racist, right-wing rhetoric’ after racist graffiti are scrawled on the front on a former care home in Carntyne following claims that it may potentially house asylum seekers and refugees. (Glasgow Live, 3 April 2025)
4 April: In Liberec, Czech Republic, a granite memorial to 111 Romani children transported from a local Nazi camp and then murdered in Auschwitz is vandalised by being struck with an axe multiple times. (Romea, 4 April 2025)
5 April: Thousands march in Belfast in memory of 14-year-old schoolboy Noah Donohoe and demand answers as to how he came to die in 2020. (Belfast Media, 7 April 2025)
8 April: At Leicester Crown Court, where two teenagers are convicted of manslaughter for an assault that led to the death of an 80-year-old man in Braunstone Town, Leicestershire, on 1 September 2024, it emerges that Bhim Kohli died after being racially abused, punched and kicked by a boy while a second teenager filmed the assault. (BBC News, 8 April 2025)
Two teenagers have been found guilty of killing 80-year-old Bhim Kohli.
Mr Kohli was attacked and racially abused, while he was out walking his dog near his home in Leicester.
They will be sentenced next month. pic.twitter.com/Tj1epvMnSm
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) April 8, 2025
14 April: Police launch an investigation after 85 graves, a large number belonging to children and babies, are desecrated in the Muslim section of Carpenders Park Lawn Cemetery in Watford, which serves north London. Brent Council condemns it as an Islamophobic hate crime and puts in place extra security measures. (Harrow Online, 14 April 2025; BBC News, 14 April 2025)
This calendar is researched by IRR staff and compiled by Sophie Chauhan, with the assistance of Graeme Atkinson, Sam Berkson, Margaret McAdam and Louis Ordish. Thanks also to ECRE, the Never Again Association and Stopwatch, whose regular updates on asylum, migration, far Right, racial violence, employment and policing issues are an invaluable source of information. Find these stories and all others since 2014 on our searchable database, the Register of Racism and Resistance.