On Sunday 3 October over 300 people – campaigners, families and concerned individuals – gathered outside Belmarsh prison to protest against the detention without trial of eleven men, all ‘foreign nationals’ and all Muslim. On 19 December 2001, just three months after the September 11 attacks, the British government arrested eight men under the Anti-terrorism
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Marking Black History
To mark Black History Month, the Institute of Race Relations has published a Black History section – including personal memoirs of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ed Scobie. Published in the October 2004 issue of Race & Class, the Black History section also includes original research on Britain’s continued involvement in the slave trade
New Labour’s new racism
The government’s asylum and citizenship policies have resulted in an upsurge in racially motivated violence and police harassment. We are now faced with the end of asylum as we know it in this country. Asylum seekers’ rights and protections have been gradually abolished and are being replaced by a system of managed migration. At the
Death trap: the human cost of the war on asylum
The IRR publishes today a roll call of death of the 180 asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who have died either in the UK or attempting to reach the UK in the past fifteen years. No section of our society is more vulnerable than asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. Forced by circumstances beyond their control
Sikh victim of vicious racist attack
A Sikh human rights activist has been brutally beaten by racists in Coventry. On 26 September, 34 year-old Jagdeesh Singh was walking home with his 10-year-old nephew from Walsgrave Hospital when he was subjected to a barrage of racist abuse. Two White men then launched a physical attack on Mr Singh – punching him some
Collective Black voice or ‘comfort zone’ for ministers?
A personal view of the third conference on the education of Black children, held recently in London. Nearly 1,000 people filled the halls of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to participate in the third conference on the achievement of Black pupils in London schools on 11 September 2004. The conference was dubbed ‘reaching for
Stealing a nation
A new documentary by John Pilger, to be screened next Wednesday, reveals how in the 1960s Britain secretly and brutally expelled the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean – so that the US could build a military base there. The largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, is now America’s biggest overseas military
Resource for Black organisations published
The National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) has published Fail to Plan: Plan to Fail, a toolkit to help black voluntary and community organisations obtain funding. Lenford White, the author of the toolkit and NIACE’s Race Equality Development Officer, believes that the toolkit will help Black organisations by ‘suggesting the necessary ingredients of
Blair on asylum: myth vs. reality
In an article in today’s Times newspaper, Tony Blair sets out his plans for a massive increase in deportations of asylum seekers. Read the article paragraph by paragraph and the distortions and double-think on which it is based become clear. The title of the article: ‘Three steps we will take for a fairer asylum system’.
Books not bars for Rachid Ramda
Rachid Ramda, an Algerian asylum seeker, has been detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison for the last nine years – even though he has not been convicted of any crime. Rachid was initially arrested on an extradition warrant from France in 1995 in connection with bomb attacks in Paris. In June 2002, the High Court