The Administrative Court in Dresden has ruled that a clause in the German government’s counter-extremism strategy is in part unlawful Last year, IRR News reported that the German federal government had introduced a clause into its grant conditions for federally-funded victim support groups fighting far-right extremism which obliges them to swear allegiance to the German
Liz Fekete examines the role and importance of grassroots monitoring groups today in Europe. This article was originally written as a contribution to a publication in which anti-racists across Europe marked the tenth anniversary of ReachOut, an anti-racist monitoring group in Berlin. Why do we need independent groups to monitor racist attacks?[1] On the tenth
How can lessons from the Lawrence case be applied to that of Oury Jalloh, who was burned to death in a German police cell seven years ago? Last Tuesday, here in the UK, two men were found guilty of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. This verdict, eighteen years in the making, gave the nation
Silent protests to mourn the victims of the National Socialist Underground will be taking place across Germany. On 26 November, anti-fascists in at least eleven German cities (Berlin, Bielefeld, Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt, Görlitz, Hamburg, Hannover, Kiel, Munich and Nuremberg) will come together to mourn the ten (currently known) victims of the far-Right terror group, National
In the run-up to the September elections in Berlin, and against the backdrop of a rise in attacks on mosques and Muslims, anti-racists in Berlin have formed the campaign Acting Together – Against Racism and Social Exclusion. The campaign ‘Acting Together – Against Racism and Social Exclusion’ (Zusammen handeln-Gegen rassistische Hetze und soziale Ausgrenzung), which
The Berlin organisation ReachOut has launched a campaign to rescind the 2003 Law on Neutrality that opened the way for the German states (Länder) to ban the headscarf. Over half of Germany’s sixteen states now ban students and civil servants (including teachers) from wearing the headscarf. The authority to do so comes from the 2003
Anti-racists in Germany are asking whether the current attacks on Islam and multiculturalism have led to yet another Islamophobic racist murder. On Sunday 31 October, a 19-year-old Iraqi man, named only as Kamal K. was stabbed to death by two men in Leipzig city centre. On 1 November, on the day that Kamal was buried
The prosecutor has withdrawn an appeal against Dr Sabine Schiffer’s acquittal in Germany for slandering a police officer. On 24 March 2010, Dr Sabine Schiffer, an anti-racist academic and Director of the Institute for Media Responsibility in Erlangen, was acquitted of slander of a police officer. She had been prosecuted for her suggestion that institutional
In July 2010, an angry crowd launched a terrifying attack on a Roma family in Limanowa, southern Poland. But why were no arrests made? And how come no one has condemned the violence? In October 1990, a crowd set fire to thirty-six Roma homes in the Romanian town of Mihail Kogalniceanu. No one was arrested
A Nigerian street vendor was shot dead following a police identity check in an open-air market in Warsaw. But is anyone asking the right questions? On 23 May 2010, Maxwell Itoya died in Warsaw after being shot by police in, as yet, unexplained circumstances. Itoya, a 36-year-old Nigerian, had lived in Poland for eight years.
