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
Geography: North-East England
Connecting the past and the present in Liverpool
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
Calendar of racism and resistance (17 May – 7 June 2018)
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.
The spiralling dynamic of fear – and how to fight it
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
JENGbA responds to the Amnesty International report on the Gangs Matrix
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
Calendar of racism and resistance (4 – 16 May 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 8 April: Corporate Watch publishes The Hostile Environment: turning the UK into a nation of border cops, download the report here. 30 April: Ismael Bokar Deh, 58, a father of eight in France for 18 years
Excessive use of restraint during charter deportation flight
A new report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on an inspection of a 2017 charter flight deporting people to third countries makes for horrifying reading. The report, Detainees under escort: Inspection of a Third Country Unit removal to France, Austria and Bulgaria, which is only seventeen pages long, is full of disturbing information on
Police database spreads institutional racism
The IRR welcomes Amnesty International and The Monitoring Group’s recent reports on the racially discriminatory nature of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Gangs Matrix intelligence database. The fact that the Information Commissioner’s Office has launched an investigation into whether the Metropolitan Police Service Trident Gangs Matrix breaches the Data Protection Act is welcome, but the dangers
Screwed by the system
Lord Herman Ouseley writes for IRR News on the findings of a recent Amnesty International report on the Gangs Matrix. By October 2017, there were 3,806 individuals on the Gangs Matrix, 87 per cent of whom were Black, Asian and of a minority ethnic background, 78 per cent of whom were black. Amnesty International spent
Calendar of racism and resistance (20 April – 3 May 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 14 April: The trial of the Stansted 15, who face terror-related charges for grounding a deportation charter flight, is adjourned until 1 October 2018. View details of a crowdfunder for the defendants here. 18 April: