A video of Professor Phil Scraton’s lecture on the Hillsborough struggle for justice, delivered last year at the London School of Economics, is now available. On 27 November 2013, the IRR and the Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and Criminal Justice (LSE) hosted a meeting to discuss family campaigns against the state to
Dear IRR News subscriber, Six years after Habib Ullah died in police custody in High Wycombe, the IPCC has referred the case to the CPS to decide whether to bring criminal charges against five police officers and a Police Federation solicitor. We show how the treatment of his death demonstrates that the system works at
The progress of another punitive Bill which strips away legal protection from migrants and will increase homelessness, ill health and destitution, seems for now to have tri-partisan support. The Immigration Bill finished its passage through the House of Commons on 30 January. The third reading ought to have been a last chance for MPs to
The Tories plan a systematic stream of populist measures on migration and welfare benefits in the run up to the election, and there appears to be no opposition. According to the Daily Mail, last month, the Conservative Party’s election strategist Lynton Crosby suggested the party begin producing ‘a new policy to curb immigrants and benefits’
As the file on the death of Habib Ullah in police custody in 2008 finally reaches the CPS, the intolerable delays in investigating deaths in custody are once more in the spotlight. This week, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) referred the case of Habib Ullah to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The IPCC’s initial
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, Eddie Bruce-Jones describes the media vilification of Emrah Kara, a man suffering from mental health problems who was shot in December 2013 by a German special police unit, and explains how this has parallels with the deaths of those from vulnerable groups at the hands of the police in
The shooting of a mentally ill man by a German special police unit, and his subsequent media vilification, echoes the deaths of vulnerable groups at the hands of the police in the UK and elsewhere. Emrah Kara lived at home with his mother in Holzminden, a small city in the German state of Lower Saxony.
A new book on Enoch Powell reappraises without rehabilitating. In December 2012, Vince Cable compared his own government’s rhetoric on immigration to Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In January of this year, UKIP leader Nigel Farage said of the same speech ‘the basic principle is right’. On both and many other occasions, columnists rushed
There is much to commend in No Place to Call Home, a potted history of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the UK and Ireland, but its reliance on police sources is worrying. There is much to praise in Katharine Quarmby’s No Place to Call Home. She capably describes the structured state and institutional racism that Gypsies
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, the IRR publishes Investigated or ignored? An analysis of race-related deaths since the Macpherson report, highlighting serious deficiencies in the criminal justice system’s response to racist murders, or as a result of attacks with a known or suspected racial element. We also publish an interview by IRR director Liz
