A new paper circulating in London, The New Londoners, produced by refugees and asylum seekers, provides a strong, alternative voice for these marginalised and often vilified communities.
The tabloid-size 24-page newspaper, produced by the Refugee Media Action Group at the Migrants Resource Centre for Refugee Week, is slickly produced with quality pictures and interesting articles which provide information and analysis about issues that affect refugees and asylum seekers in London.
The New Londoners contains articles on the Strangers into Citizens campaign, media coverage/hysteria on asylum issues, party political differences on asylum, the housing crisis and destitution as well as personal accounts of the process of seeing asylum in the UK, a worldwide map of global human displacement, stories of refugee achievements, political interviews with Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone and much, much more. Refugees and asylum seekers spent months researching and writing for the paper which will turn into a web-based paper and blog. It is hoped to produce the papers on a quarterly basis.
Nazek Ramadan, Migrant & Refugee Empowerment Worker at the Migrant Resource Centre told IRR News: ‘Our project is unique in that it gives a voice to those who have, over recent years, been subject to increasing hostility from the media. MPs and Peers have addressed the issue of negative media coverage in the recent Joint Committee on Human Rights report. In particular the effects it can have on individual asylum seekers and the potential it has to influence the decision making of officials and Government policy. We are also concerned about the possibility of a link between hostile reporting by the media and physical attacks on asylum seekers.’