Dear IRR News subscriber,

This week, following on from Liz Fekete’s analysis of refugee deaths in Greece, the IRR’s News Team examines seven deaths on the western Balkans route, focusing on Serbia and its borders with Hungary and Bulgaria. Responsibility for these deaths belongs not only with national governments such as Hungary’s, fomenting anti-refugee hatred and creating a cadre of ‘border hunters’, but also with the EU and its agencies such as Frontex, whose presence and assistance on the borders arguably legitimises brutal and illegal policies.

It is grassroots voluntary groups like Fresh Response Serbia who provide much of the information on human rights violations at the borders. Sonia Nandzik, a member of Fresh Response, describes how the group’s focus expanded from providing fresh fruit and vegetables to refugees living in makeshift camps in Serbia, to monitoring violence by border guards at the Hungarian border. And focusing on the UK and Sweden, we publish an analysis, by Aisha Maniar, of the practice of administrative language testing of asylum seekers: a process which as she describes frequently starts from a position of ‘mistrust of the veracity of the asylum seeker’s claims’.

Our regular calendar of racism and resistance, a fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, is available here.

And finally, a reminder that this weekend is the last chance to see the ‘We are the lions’ exhibition, commemorating the 1976 Grunwick strike, at Willesden Green library.

IRR News team