The right of refugees to seek protection in Europe is under threat from anti-trafficking initiatives. The context in which refugee policy is framed within the European Union has changed dramatically since the 1980s. From being an issue of human rights and cold-war politics it had, by the early 1990s as the number of asylum claims
Geography: Other
The dispersal of xenophobia – a new report from the IRR
According to research by the Institute of Race Relations’ European Race Audit the policy of dispersing asylum seekers, now being introduced into the UK and Ireland, but already practised in other European countries for some years, effectively means the dispersal of xenophobia. The outcry by residents of Over Stowey, Somerset, against a proposed asylum hostel
Europe’s asylum-prison complex
It’s the beginning of March and 100 people have gathered in Cambridge’s central marketplace to oppose the opening of Britain’s latest detention centre at a former military barracks in Oakington, north-west of Cambridge. On 20 March, activists from Cambridgeshire Against Refugee Detention gather again, this time outside the detention centre itself as the first disoriented
Uniting Against Globalisation
In June, the leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations met at the G8 summit in Cologne. For a few days the city was swamped with government officials, press teams and camera crews. But in the shadows of the media spotlight different voices were struggling to be heard – the voice of the Inter-Continental Caravan, a
People vs. Corporations: the Inter-Continental Caravan in Britain
On 21 May, at ‘People vs Corporations’, a public hearing at Euston, London, activists from the Inter-Continental Caravan (ICC) and from other people’s movements from India and Nepal came together with campaigners in Britain. The Punjabi and Gujurati Farmers’ Unions and two representatives of INHURED (International Institute for Human Rights, Environment and Development) from Nepal,
From Schengen to La Linea: breaking down borders
The German campaign No one is Illegal is preparing to mount a week of action against Fortress Europe, organising camps at the EU frontier between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. Dutch activists have also organised a border camp and in Poland anti-fascists will demonstrate at the central border police station and at the border
Institutionalised racism and human rights abuses
A special investigation into 45 deaths in Europe in 1998. Human rights abuses, we are told, occur in the Third World – certainly not in democratic Europe. But the 45 deaths we document here throw into question Europe’s respect for human rights. For the treatment of immigrants, asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities is the benchmark by
Europe, the Press And Crime
Across Europe, thanks to press reporting, ‘criminal’, ‘immigrant’, ‘Roma’ are becoming interchangeable. In focusing on immigrant crime, the press reflects the priorities of police and politicians who are the main sources for such stories. Police crime statistics The raw material for immigrant crime stories are police reports, particularly the release of selective and ethnically-based crime
Globalism and the Left
If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, globalism is the latest stage of imperialism – and, yet, nowhere in the whole literature of the Left[1] is there any evidence of a systematic attempt to understand, let alone combat, the havoc being wreaked on Third World countries by capital in its latest avatar. Instead, the
The Internet: New Media Or Old Values?
”One European is worth 28 Chinese, or perhaps 2 Welsh miners worth 1000 Pakistanis.” That was the unwritten rule used by BBC news in the 1970s to rate a story’s importance, according to the inside account by Philip Schlesinger in his book Putting ‘Reality’ Together . In the intervening years we may have seen some