Dear IRR News subscriber,

In a week in which the Crown Prosecution Service has announced that it will bring manslaughter charges over the death of Angolan asylum seeker Jimmy Mubenga, the IRR teams up with the Border Crossing Observatory at Monash University, Melbourne, and with the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Kings College, London, to bring new insights to bear on the Global North’s callous mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees.

During a crisis of globalised indifference to human suffering, IRR News has commissioned essays from three leading writers on migration issues – from Australia and the UK, asking them to rethink ways in which resistance can be imagined and the battle for human dignity fought.

ISCI’s Alicia de la Cour Venning argues that the deaths of migrants at the borders, depicted as individual tragedies, should be treated as state crimes, if not of commission, at least of omission, the predictable results of rich countries’ policies of exclusion. IRR director Liz Fekete calls for the involvement of the arts in the struggle for human dignity against the ‘depraved indifference’ which creates these policies, and the market-driven, consumerist culture, dulling curiosity and conscience, which allows their proliferation. Leanne Weber of the Border Crossing Observatory emphasises the importance of counting and accounting for migrants’ deaths at the border, to recapture their humanity and attribute state responsibility.

In news from across the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service has stated that Stuart Tribelnig (38), Terry Hughes (53), and Colin Kaler (51), will be charged with manslaughter over Jimmy Mubenga’s death in 2010. And immigration detainees being deported from the UK still face ‘disproportionate force and restraint’ and are subjected to offensive language from their escorts, according to a new report by the Ministry of Justice.

Jon Burnett

Assistant Editor, IRR News