Dear IRR News subscriber,

This is the last bulletin from IRR till the New Year. And educationalist, Robin Richardson, takes us through the festive season and into 2015, with a wry take on the ‘Trojan Horse affair’.

And as 2014 draws to a close, we also take the opportunity to take a look at the criminal justice system, highlighting issues of racism and accountability.

The IRR’s vice-chair Frances Webber examines the judge’s decision to rule evidence of racism inadmissible in the recent trial of three G4S guards, charged with the manslaughter of Jimmy Mubenga during a deportation in 2010. As she expands in a comment piece for the Guardian, ‘Justice demands that the reality of racism be brought into the courtroom, not excluded.’ We also have a guest post from a Justice for Jimmy Mubenga campaigner on the long fight for justice waged by Adrienne Makenda Kambana, Jimmy Mubenga’s widow.

The rising toll of suicides in prisons and young offenders’ institutions in the UK is examined in a new briefing paper: Hidden despair: The deaths of foreign national prisoners. This briefing paper comes in advance of a forthcoming IRR report Dying for Justice (February 2015) on BME deaths in custody.

There has been some positive news, though, this month. Parliament’s Justice Committee has called for an urgent review of the law of joint enterprise in murder cases, specifically highlighting the disproportionate impact of the joint enterprise doctrine on ‘Black and mixed race young men’. We reproduce the statement of Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association Campaign (JENGbA) which wholeheartedly welcomed the Justice Committee’s ‘bold’ report.

Our regular calendar of racism and resistance rounds-up key new stories and events across the UK and Europe.

And finally, the IRR’s activities over the past year are detailed in our 2014 Annual Report, available here (pdf file, 1.1mb).

IRR News Team