Catriona Jarvis and Syd Bolton, co-convenors of the Last Rights project, celebrate real progress in the struggle for dignified treatment for migrants who lose their lives, with the signing in Lesbos of the Mytilini Declaration in May. 11 May 2018 can be put in the diary as a landmark date for future reference. On that
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week the Guardian published The List of 34,361 known deaths at the EU’s borders since 1993, which includes three teenage Eritrean asylum seekers, who came from the migrant camp in Calais to the UK, who have committed suicide here in the past seven months. Istanbul-based artist Banu Cennetoğlu, who posts
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 3 June: Scottish refugee charities raise concerns about the number of asylum seekers forced into ‘state-sponsored homelessness’ after being released from Dungavel detention centre with nowhere to go. (Herald, 3 June 2018) 5 June: Serco
On 11 January 2017, 27-year-old Lukasz Debowski was found hanged in his room at Morton Hall, an immigration detention centre in Lincoln. 2017 was the deadliest year in immigration detention, with the largest number of deaths. Lukasz Debowski was the first of six people to die that year, and the fifth person to die at
Danny Reilly reviews an important new book detailing the migrant history of Liverpool. Based on the work of the Great War to Race Riots Archive presented to Liverpool-based organisation Writing on the Wall, this book/project centres around the ‘race riots’ in Liverpool in 1919, but tells a much wider and inter-connected story. As its bibliography
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, IRR News celebrates the opening of the exhibition at the British Library, Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land, on which our chair, Colin Prescod was lead external adviser. Windrush traces the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean since the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, travelling through the slave trade, colonialism,
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 15 May: Canada grants political asylum to Viktória Mohácsi, a former Hungarian MEP and Roma rights activist. After exposing police incompetence in the Roma serial killers case, Mohácsi received constant threats and sought police protection.
Frances Webber reviews Corporate Watch’s new report: ‘Who is immigration policy for? The media-politics of the hostile environment’. The central thesis of this closely argued and compelling report, Who is immigration policy for? The media-politics of the hostile environment, is that the purpose of tough immigration policies is not to control immigration – ‘deterrent’ policies don’t
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, the IRR welcomes two path-breaking reports, by Amnesty International and The Monitoring Group, on the racially discriminatory nature of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Trident Gangs Matrix intelligence database. IRR News also gathers together critical perspectives on gang databases from Lord Herman Ouseley and the advocacy organisation Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by
Below we reproduce Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association’s (JENGbA) statement on the recent Amnesty International report on the Gangs Matrix. JENGbA welcomes the damning Amnesty International report that highlights the government’s racist, bogus war on gangs. The Met’s gang-mapping database, known as the Gangs Matrix, lists individuals as ‘gang nominals’ with each given an automated violence
