On 30 June, 23-year-old Mustafa Dawood, who was from the Darfur region of Sudan, was found dead after falling from a building in Newport, Wales as immigration officers carried out a raid at a car wash. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is investigating the death, and its press release noted: ‘A 23 year
Geography: North-West England
Calendar of racism and resistance (6 – 19 July 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration July: Sentina D’Artanyan-Bristol, the mother of Dexter Bristol, ‘a child of the Windrush generation, who died this March, following a year of being rejected as a British citizen’ is raising funds to cover the legal
Windrush: Songs in a strange land
A review on a powerful exhibition at the British Library on the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean post-Windrush, which refuses to take the usual UK-centric approach. The recent ‘Windrush scandal’ has woken the nation to the institutional cruelty at the heart of the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment policies’. Now, a brilliant free exhibition running
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is coming to London
A call for migrant rights organisations to sign up to support the Tribunal and to submit evidence. The London hearing of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), the international public opinion tribunal established in the 1970s to draw attention to human rights violations worldwide, is scheduled for early November. One of a series of hearings on
Macpherson definition misunderstood in Labour Party anti-Semitism definition
As the Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour’s National Executive Committee meet to discuss the adoption of a contentious definition of anti-Semitism, the IRR draws attention to its evidence to the Chakrabarti Review, submitted two years ago. In June 2016, we drew attention to the dangers of introducing too much subjectivity into the definition of racism,
Calendar of racism and resistance (22 June – 5 July 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 21 June: The Home Office publishes a sixty-page ‘Statement of Intent’ for an EU citizens’ settlement scheme post-Brexit. Download the document here; read a critique here. 24 June: A parliamentary written answer reveals that MPs
The past in the present
Past oppressions are written into our statues, our architecture and our walls. This special issue of Race & Class brings a new perspective to reparatory history. ‘We are, at this moment, witnessing an eruption of active memory’, say Anita Rupprecht and Cathy Bergin. Resistances mobilised around Confederacy statues have provoked mass protests and fierce debate.
The rights of migrant dead and their families: a declaration of intent
Catriona Jarvis and Syd Bolton, co-convenors of the Last Rights project, celebrate real progress in the struggle for dignified treatment for migrants who lose their lives, with the signing in Lesbos of the Mytilini Declaration in May. 11 May 2018 can be put in the diary as a landmark date for future reference. On that
Calendar of racism and resistance (8 – 21 June 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 3 June: Scottish refugee charities raise concerns about the number of asylum seekers forced into ‘state-sponsored homelessness’ after being released from Dungavel detention centre with nowhere to go. (Herald, 3 June 2018) 5 June: Serco
Report published into Lukasz Debowski’s death at Morton Hall
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