Dear IRR News subscriber,

In a week which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, we publish a personal reflection by Harmit Athwal. The IRR’s News Editor explains why the events at Hillsborough resonate with her family in a piece that brings to mind the experiences of so many other BME families who have lost faith in the police. We also publish a detailed analysis of the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan in 2011, showing that the police, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and judiciary, as well as the media, played important roles in determining how the shooting was framed, long before the jury sat down in the courtroom.

Liz Fekete reviews a new report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which investigates the legal doctrine of joint enterprise in criminal convictions. And as part of our ‘Taking a Stand for Human Dignity’ series, Francesco Vecchio and Cosmo Beatson explain how, in Hong Kong, the Refugee Union’s Occupy Movement is taking on a deterrent asylum system.

In news from across the UK, the Home Office has denied Jamaican woman Keisha Rushton a visa to enter the UK in order to donate a kidney to her brother, Oliver Cameron. A blind asylum seeker who had to flee Cameroon because of his sexuality says that he has been assaulted at Heathrow during an attempted deportation. And, in Northern Ireland, a ‘dramatic’ increase in racist attacks has been reported, some of which are being carried out by Loyalist paramilitaries.

Finally, the IRR is co-sponsoring and speaking at the conference ‘How violent is Britain?’ at the University of Liverpool on 16 May 2014. Book your place to hear discussions on how state, institutional and corporate violence should be tackled.

Jon Burnett

Assistant Editor, IRR News