ELECTORAL POLITICS | GOVERNMENT POLICY
10 December: The Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, says Keir Starmer and ‘middle-of-the-road’ politicians are playing into the hands of the Right and risk creating a hierarchy of people by curbing fundamental rights in the name of immigration control. (Guardian, 10 December 2025)
11 December: Kevin McKenna, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, tells the House of Commons that people in the public gallery wearing balaclavas disrupted a meeting of Swale Borough Council, Kent, shouting and banging, violently intimidating councillors and pelting them with eggs and missiles during a debate on a ‘District of Sanctuary’ motion welcoming asylum seekers and refugees in the area. The motion did not pass. (Independent, 11 December 2025)
11 December: At St Michael’s Cornhill church, London, Reform UK launches ‘Christians for Reform’, with Sarah Pochin MP declaring, ‘Reform will always stand up for Christianity in this country, we are fundamentally a Christian country and we are proud to be Christian’. (Left Foot Forward, 15 December 2025)
16 December: French former National Front/ National Assembly leader Marine Le Pen loses her appeal against her conviction for defamation of migrants’ solidarity organisation CIMADE, whom she accused of human smuggling in 2022. (BMF, 16 December 2025)
19 December: Reform UK is urged to drop Hampshire and Solent mayoral candidate Chris Parry after it emerges that the retired naval rear admiral said that David Lammy should ‘go home to the Caribbean’ and questioned the loyalty to the UK of at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds, and deputy leader Richard Tice refuses to condemn the comments. (Guardian, 19 December 2025; Guardian, 16 December 2025)
21 December: The government’s Social Mobility Commissioner says the prime minister has no coherent strategy to tackle entrenched inequalities and warns that without a ‘universal view’ of social mobility, it could be subsumed by diversity, equality and inclusion policies – an agenda that Reform UK has characterised as ‘woke’ and promised to dismantle. (Guardian, 21 December 2025)
22 December: At a special meeting, Belfast City Council passes a motion supporting the Palestine Action prison hunger strike in England, demanding that the hunger strikers be granted bail and calling for the de-proscription of PA. (Irish News, 22 December 2025)
ANTI-FASCISM AND THE FAR RIGHT
10 December: Far-right vigilantes who film themselves slashing migrant boats in France are posing as journalists and offering migrants money for interviews on camera, the I paper reveals. (The I paper, 10 December 2025)
12 December: Two 18-year-olds appear in court accused of planning terrorist attacks on Cardiff’s Madina Mosque and a Jewish cemetery. Prosecutors say the pair researched weapons and 3D-printed gun parts, explosives and escape plans while discussing killing Muslims and Jewish people on Discord. Both defendants plead not guilty and a trial is scheduled for February 2027. (BBC News, 12 December 2025)
15 December: Prosecutors in Berlin charge Alternative for Germany (AfD) lawmaker Matthias Moosdorf with giving a banned Nazi salute in the Bundestag after lawmakers lift his immunity. They say he performed a heel click and salute in the Reichstag in 2023, though Moosdorf denies it and calls the case a political fabrication. (Reuters, 15 December 2025)
18 December: German authorities charge eight suspects including teenagers with attempted murder and membership of a far-right terrorist group that allegedly targets migrants and political opponents to destabilise the country’s democracy. Prosecutors say the group, Last Defence Wave, plans or carries out arson and bomb attacks on asylum-seeker housing and left-wing institutions while promoting racist and antisemitic ideology. (Times Union, 18 December 2025)
18 December: Gardaí and the PSNI arrest multiple suspects in an alleged far-right plot by the Irish Defence Army to attack a Galway mosque and facilities housing migrants. One suspect appears in court as police cite messages linking him to a ’15-point plan’ for the attack, while his defence says he was just trying to impress a family member. (Irish Independent, 18 December 2025)
20 December: It is revealed that the Hungarian government has labelled the antifascist movement ‘Antifa’ terrorist and removed 12 years of Roma rights reports in moves that critics say expand state power and suppress dissent, reflecting a broader far-right drift that targets minorities, erases accountability, and weakens democratic safeguards. (ERRC, 20 December 2025)
20 December: Stand Up to Racism oppose a ‘Patriots March’ in Oxford attended by 50 people who identified their aims as stopping Islamic extremism, stopping the boats and combating antisemitism. (Oxford Mail, 20 December 2025)
ANTI-TERRORISM AND NATIONAL SECURITY
18 December: A UNSR report on the use of AI in countering terrorism warns that the new technologies used in counter-terrorism are ‘unleashing new waves of human rights violations targeting civil society’. (OHCHR via Statewatch, 19 December 2025)
POLICING| PRISONS| CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
10 December: It is revealed that police forces successfully lobbied the NPCC to use a facial recognition technology known to be biased against ethnic minorities, women and young people, complaining that another version of the technology produced fewer suspects. (Guardian, 10 December 2025)
17 December: Hours after the Met and Greater Manchester police announce, following the deadly Bondi Beach attacks in Australia, that anyone shouting ‘globalise the intifada’ or holding a placard with the phrase on it will be arrested, two people are charged with linked racially-aggravated public order offences following a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice. (Guardian, 17 December 2025; Independent, 18 December 2025)
17 December: Prisoners for Palestine reports that Qesser Zuhrah, who is on the 46th day of her hunger strike, was initially denied an ambulance even though she was writhing in pain on her cell floor at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey. After protesters gather outside the prison, she is taken to hospital. (Guardian, 17 December 2025)
18 December: In Turin, Italy, riot police use water cannon to seal off and close the anarchist and anti-capitalist Askatasuna social centre. The police shutdown of the centre is justified as a response to pro-Palestinian actions targeting the offices of the defence company Leonardo and of the La Stampa newspaper. (ANSA, 18 December 2025)
20 December: Legal experts say that the police no longer care if they exceed public order powers, citing their use of ‘cumulative disruption’ regulations quashed as unlawful in May to police pro-Palestine groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the Palestine Coalition. (Guardian, 20 December 2025)
21 December: MPs and next of kin demand urgent government action as Palestine Action hunger strikers Amu Gib and Kamran Ahmed are rushed to hospital. Justice secretary David Lammy refuses to meet lawyers representing the families. Several MPs write to the Prison Inspectorate citing ‘inconsistent and unreliable’ treatment of the hunger strikers. (Guardian, 21 December 2025)
23 December: Two men, described as ‘Islamist extremists’, are found guilty at Preston crown court of a plot to ‘kill as many Jewish people as they could’ in Greater Manchester, which involved the preparation of acts of terrorism and the attempted purchase of weapons via a man who, unknown to them, was an ‘undercover operative’. (Guardian, 23 December 2025)
23 December: Greta Thunberg is arrested for displaying support for the Palestine Action prisoners at a solidarity action for the hunger strikers outside the office of Aspen Insurance, which activists say provides services to Elbit Systems, a subsidiary of Israeli arms maker Elbit. Two activists are arrested on suspicion of criminal damage. (Guardian, 23 December 2025)
ASYLUM | MIGRATION| BORDERS| CITIZENSHIP
Asylum and migrant rights
10 December: 1,500 people mark International Human Rights Day by attending a rally in Dublin, Ireland, organised by Abolish Direct Provision Ireland, calling for an amnesty and residence rights for asylum seekers who have been in the process for longer than six months. (Irish Times, 10 December 2025)
10 December: At a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg, France, 27 countries including the UK sign a statement that identifies articles of the European Convention on Human Rights they believe should be changed to facilitate easier deportations, as all 46 members promise to discuss changes to be agreed at a meeting in May. (Guardian, 10 December 2025)
10 December: A report by the National Audit Office finds more than half (56 percent) of people who applied for asylum three years ago have not yet received a decision and that the home secretary’s new asylum policy to accelerate decisions and reduce appeals ‘without effective action on the bottlenecks’ will create an increase in backlogs and homelessness. (Guardian, 10 December 2025; EIN, 10 December 2025)
15 December: The High Court quashes as unlawful the Home Office’ cancellation of an e-visa and instruction to an airline to deny boarding to a long-term UK resident with indefinite leave to remain (later claimed to have been mistakenly granted) who had left the country on holiday and was made street-homeless in Turkey by the decision. The court orders the home secretary to return the man to the UK. (Free Movement, 22 December 2025)
21 December: A report from Bright Blue, a centre-right think tank, finds claims made by recent home secretaries of widespread abuse of the modern slavery system by asylum seekers to be untrue, as 90 percent of those referred were assessed to have reasonable grounds to be classified as victims. (Guardian, 21 December 2025)
Borders and internal controls
12 December: A 100-metre tunnel is found on the border of Belarus and Poland, where 130 migrants, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, are detained after emerging from it ten metres from the Polish border. (Euronews, 13 December 2025)
15 December: Nadia Whittome MP tables an EDM which is signed by a further 23 MPs, in response to a report by the Humans For Rights Network on the state violence inflicted on asylum seekers on the border with France, and the UK taxpayer funding facilitating it, and calling for safe routes, proper recording of fatalities and an inquiry into state violence at the border. (UK Parliament, 15 December 2025)
16 December: Euromed publishes a study on the use of new technology in the identification and search for missing and deceased persons in migration. (Euromed, 16 December 2025)
17 December: Italy’s Court of Cassation rejects the prosecutor’s appeal against the acquittal of former interior minister Matteo Salvini on charges of kidnap and dereliction of duty for halting the disembarkation of 147 people rescued by Spanish SAR vessel Open Arms in August 2019, as part of his closed ports policy. (ANSI, 18 December 2025)
18 December: The Court of Justice of the EU rules that Frontex’s accountability and its duties to safeguard human rights, and principles of equality of arms, require it to produce evidence in its possession when pushbacks or other abuses are alleged against it, and that it is jointly liable with host states for abuses in deportation flights. (ELENA Weekly Legal Update, 19 December 2025)
Reception and detention
10 December: As the Crowborough Shield residents’ group requests a judicial review opposing the housing of 540 single male asylum seekers at the Crowborough military training camp, night patrols and protests take place around the camp as tensions rise following rumours of the imminent yet unconfirmed arrival of migrants. (BBC, 11 December 2025; Guardian, 11 December 2025)
14 December: After FOI requests reveal that 51 people died in asylum accommodation in 2024, human rights and refugee support groups call on the Home Office to publish quarterly data on deaths of asylum seekers in its care, as the NHS and the Ministry of Justice do, to improve accountability and transparency and obviate the need for regular FOI requests. (Guardian, 14 December 2025)
15 December: A case brought by two detainees from Egypt and Bangladesh who were detained between July 2023 and March 2024 reveals that the Home Office is unlawfully failing vulnerable migrants in detention centres, with significant evidence that protections against inhuman and degrading treatment have been absent for the past eight years. (Guardian, 15 December 2025)
15 December: Campaigners protest outside the Home Office in support of Ibrahima Bah and against his unjust conviction and 9-and-a-half years prison sentence following the 2022 tragedy when the dinghy he was coerced into steering sank and at least four people died. They call on the government to overturn the conviction and end the criminalisation and imprisonment of people seeking safety. (Morning Star, 15 December 2025)
🆕 ARTICLE!
In light of Ibrahima Bah’s conviction, Vicky Taylor discusses how prosecutions, and the scapegoating of individuals for deaths in the Channel, which are systemic to the British border regime, must end.
✍️https://t.co/cegbGS2sVy pic.twitter.com/26TSi3T4X7
— Institute of Race Relations (@IRR_News) March 1, 2024
16 December: Appeal court judges uphold the decision made last year that Tamils held on the remote island Diego Garcia, accommodated in rat-infested tents and deprived of their liberty for over three years, were unlawfully detained by the British Indian Ocean Territory commissioner. (Guardian, 16 December 2025)
16 December: Asylum accommodation provider Mears is ordered to return £13.8 million to the Home Office as the company records excessive rates of profit, which peaked at 17 percent in northern Ireland, where former residents allege that the company denied them essentials such as enough food, heating and access to hygiene. (BBC, 16 December 2025)
17 December: The high court orders the Home Office to extend the refugee move-on period from 28 to 56 days in cases when an individual is at imminent risk of street homelessness. A pilot to extend the period, launched last December, ended in August. (Guardian, 18 December 2025)
18 December: Napier barracks in Folkstone, which opened in 2020 as asylum accommodation, is closed. It became notorious for unacceptable conditions leading to hunger strikes, fires, and a high court ruling of failure to meet minimum standards. Those providing support to barracks residents welcome the closure. (Guardian, 18 December 2025)
Deportations
12 December: The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom condemns the EU’s new returns policy and its revised list of ‘safe’ countries, arguing that in many of the countries listed, journalists and critics of government face imprisonment, harassment and violence. (ECPMF, 12 December 2025)
Crimes of solidarity
15 December: Six staff members of the Tunisian branch of France Terre d’Asile, including the group’s former head, who has been held detained for over 19 months, go on trial alongside 17 municipal workers from Sousse charged with harbouring migrants and facilitating their illegal entry and residence, carrying a maximum ten years’ imprisonment. Amnesty International denounces the ‘bogus’ criminal trial. (RFI, 15 December 2025)
Citizenship
15 December: A woman who fled rape and torture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 18 years ago successfully challenges the refusal of her citizenship application on the ground that applications are normally refused ‘regardless of the time that has passed’ since the ‘illegal’ entry into the UK. (Guardian, 15 December 2025)
18 December: A new report by Runnymede Trust and Reprieve reveals that 62 percent of Black Britons, the same percentage of Britons of ‘Other’ ethnicity and 60 percent of Asian Britons are dual nationals and so are vulnerable to citizenship stripping, compared with only 5 percent of white Britons. (Runnymede via Statewatch, 19 December 2025)
Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. Our new briefing with @reprievehq.bsky.social reveals a shocking racial disparity in citizenship stripping practices.
3 in 5 people of colour are at risk of having their UK citizenship stripped, at the discretion of the Home Office 🧵👇
— Runnymede Trust (@runnymedetrust.bsky.social) 11 December 2025 at 09:13
HUMAN RIGHTS AND DISCRIMINATION
10 December: A report by the Bonavero Institute, Examining ten reasons to stay in the European Convention on Human Rights, seeks to correct misleading reporting on the impact of the ECHR on immigration control. (Bonavero Institute, 10 December 2025)
10 December: The EHRC’s new head, Mary-Ann Stephenson, warns that the government is failing to uphold key human rights through restrictions on protest, neglect of disabled people’s access to healthcare, and allowing labour exploitation of migrant workers in particular. (Morning Star, 10 December 2025)
22 December: The EHRC chief warns that taking the UK out of the European Convention on Human rights would be a mistake and that the associated demonisation of migrants is dangerous and often based on false information. (Guardian, 22 December 2025)
HOUSING| POVERTY| WELFARE
17 December: In Badalona, a working-class city bordering Barcelona, Spain, riot police evict hundreds of mostly undocumented migrants, predominantly from Senegal, and Gambia from an abandoned school building. (Associated Press, 17 December 2025)
18 December: The CJEU rules that Denmark’s ‘ghetto package’, targeting neighbourhoods for elimination where most residents are classified as ‘non-Western’, breaches the EU’s Equality Directive and is racially discriminatory. (Open Society Justice Initiative, 18 December 2025)
EMPLOYMENT| EXPLOITATION | INDUSTRIAL ACTION
18 December: A survey by Unite finds that nearly half of workers in key sectors including healthcare, transport and food have experienced racism, discrimination or unfair treatment in the workplace. (Morning Star, 18 December 2025)
21 December: A survey of its members by the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) finds that six out of ten say their wages are insufficient to cover basic needs such as food and energy, while 90 percent have reduced heating to save money. (Morning Star, 21 December 2025)
CULTURE| MEDIA| SPORT
While we cannot cover all incidents of racist abuse on sportspersons or their responses, we provide a summary of the most important incidents. For more information follow Kick it Out.
11 December: A London venue apologises after an animation at a Primal Scream show allegedly shows a Star of David entwined with a swastika during the song ‘Swastika Eyes’, with the Roundhouse saying the imagery was used without its knowledge. Jewish security group Community Security Trust (CST) condemns the display as antisemitic and calls for an urgent investigation. Images of political leaders and Gaza also appear in the animation, ending with the message ‘Our government is complicit in genocide’. (Guardian, 11 December 2025)
17 December: UEFA hands Maccabi Tel Aviv a €20,000 fine and a suspended away-fan ban after ruling that supporters engaged in racist and discriminatory chanting during a Europa League match in Stuttgart, Germany. (Sky News, 17 December 2025)
18 December: Hundreds of musicians, including Massive Attack and Brian Eno, sign an open letter urging Live Nation to end its operations in Israel, accusing the company of helping to ‘artwash’ oppression in Gaza. (Euronews, 18 December 2025)
19 December: Czech president Petr Pavel and his wife Eva plan to meet young football players who faced racist insults from fans on a train in November, an incident now under police investigation for possible defamation of a nation, race, or ethnic group. (Radio Prague, 19 December 2025)
21 December: Nottingham’s Himmah Hub, a joint Muslim-Jewish social justice initiative whose ten-year-old Salaam/Shalom project brings people together through food to tackle social isolation, racism and food poverty, is featured in the Guardian’s charity appeal. (Guardian, 21 December 2025)
22 December: Following Iceland’s decision to boycott Eurovision 2026, saying Israel’s participation means the event will bring neither joy nor peace, a group of 170 Belgian artists denounces RTBF’s decision to participate while Israel remains in the contest, arguing the event risks normalising violations of international law and calling out double standards given Russia’s 2022 exclusion. (BBC News, 10 December 2025; Euronews, 22 December 2025)
22 December: A Guardian investigation reveals that the UK’s biggest businesses have rolled back their public support for LGBTQ+ since Trump’s re-election, with mentions of Pride celebrations down by over 90 percent since 2023. (Guardian, 22 December 2025)
RACIAL VIOLENCE AND HARASSMENT
For details of court judgements on racially motivated and other hate crimes, see also POLICING | PRISONS | CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.
18 December: Nottinghamshire police launch an investigation after antisemitic graffiti are sprayed at a skate park in Childwell, Broxtowe. (BBC News, 18 December 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, Research Against Global Authoritarianism 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.