Three years after Capita took on a Ministry of Justice contract to provide interpreting services in courts and tribunals, recent cases and an independent review have demonstrated that it is still failing, with serious consequences. Court translation On average, 700 requests are made to the courts in England and Wales every day for the use
Below we reproduce an article by author Matt Carr from his blog, Infernal Machine, on the current situation in the Mediterranean. British tabloid editors have never struck me as a particularly reflective and thoughtful breed of humanity, so I doubt they will be plunged into a mood of remorseful self-analysis by the very strongly-worded suggestion from the
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Violence and harassment 12 April: Four severed pigs’ heads are found on the doorstep of a community centre in Birmingham which is reportedly being used as a mosque. The incident comes a day after the windows of the building
Dear IRR News subscriber, In the week that the European Union woke up to its complicity in the horrific drowning of thousands of desperate would-be refugees in the Mediterranean, it was very fitting that the IRR launched in a public debate on ‘Why do we count deaths’ its two recent reports on lives which seemingly
On 18 April, a celebration event of the work of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and its Director Emeritus, Sivanandan, turned into a serious discussion on how to unite and strengthen struggles at a time of globalisation and austerity. Divided into three sessions – past, present, future – the packed afternoon covered a conspectus
On Monday 20 April, a man died at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (IRC) in Bedford, the third person to die there since it opened in November 2001.[1] The Guardian reported that the man died from a heart attack while being held in the family unit at Yarl’s Wood. Named as Pinakin Patel, the 33-year-old
A recent community campaigning book from France on deaths in police custody shows just how alarmingly similar the French experience is to that in Britain. On 21 August 2014, Abdelhak Goradia (51), an Algerian undocumented migrant, died in a police van on his way to Roissy airport, near Paris, to be deported. A police spokesperson
My conversation with Colin was recorded in 2011. But I have been given the chance to update some of those ideas for this event on 18 April 2015. Neoliberalism is not working. All that stuff, about wealth trickling down, no society only individuals, the market as the regulator of everything, is shown to be false
A group of activists are creatively protesting against the effects of the Immigration Act 2014 on migrants’ access to NHS services. On 6 April 2015, new immigration health surcharges came into force under the Immigration Act 2014. These surcharges affect non-European Economic Area (EEA) nationals who come to the UK to work, study, or visit their
The April 2015 issue of Race & Class argues that Northern Ireland’s BAME communities have been living the peace process in reverse. In 1971 British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling suggested that the situation in Northern Ireland amounted to ‘an acceptable level of violence’. During ‘the Troubles’, this became the de facto security policy of successive British governments
