Anti-extremism frameworks, popular in policy and academic circles, are masking the multi-dimensional and pan-European nature of contemporary fascism and the role of the state. Not since the early 1990s, and the pogroms at Hoyerswerda and Rostock have Europe’s far-right movements posed such a tangible threat to the safety of racial and religious minorities. In truth,
This week, we publish a briefing paper which documents a growing tide of hostility against Europe’s Romani communities. Europe’s Roma face a double victimisation both as Roma and as migrants and are fast becoming the number one scapegoat for the economic crisis, argues IRR’s Director Liz Fekete in this hard-hitting review of anti-Roma hate campaigns
Attacks in Germany linked to the NSU trial demonstrate that the far Right does not need a stimulus for violence. Following the brutal murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich and attacks on several mosques, the government-funded Tell MAMA project warned of the dangers of cumulative extremism, tit-for-tat violence between Islamists and counter-jihadists and a
An interview with a spokesperson from Antirassisistischer und Antifaschister Ratschlag. European government counter-extremism policies which classify fascism as just another form of contemporary extremism (which also includes Left extremism and in some cases anti-fascism) are being resisted by victim support groups in Germany. In 2012, at a time when the federal government was attempting to
Can European security services and law enforcement agencies be entrusted with policing the far Right? Far-right and neo-Nazi violence – on the increase across Europe – is the subject of ongoing research by the Institute of Race Relations which releases today an interim report on the security services’ approach to the far Right in Austria,
Asylum-seekers and migrants across Europe are determined to change the inhuman circumstances of their existence. In his new book Fortress Europe: dispatches from a gated continent, journalist Matthew Carr describes a protest in Lombardy in which five migrants climbed to the top of a crane above Brescia’s new light railway line. ‘For seventeen days they
A review of the major development in initiatives against racial profiling in European policing. Black and Asian kids from poor neighbourhoods repeatedly stopped and searched by police in the UK, identity card checks on people of Muslim appearance in central Paris, or of Muslims outside mosques in Germany, round-ups of migrants without papers in Greece,
A new report from Germany highlights the institutional racism that lies behind official responses to the far Right. In the wake of the scandal surrounding the police’s failure to prevent the eleven murders carried out by the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and the subsequent promise by the federal government to strengthen the pro-democracy fight against
Campaigners in Germany demand that the death of Ousman Sey in police custody be properly investigated. On 7 July Ousman Sey, a 45-year-old man of Gambian origin, died after being taken into the custody of the Dortmund police. This is the third black death in police custody in Germany since 2005. Already, the indications are
In Poland, the public prosecutor has closed the investigation into the police shooting of a Nigerian street vendor. Two years ago, on 23 May 2010, a young Nigerian man, Maxwell Itoya, was shot dead by a policeman in an open-air market in Warsaw where he sold shoes. The unexplained tragedy attracted a lot of public
