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
Issue: Books, pamphlets & multimedia
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:
Paris: still on the streets
The abject failure of French President Macron to carry out his promise to get refugees ‘off the streets, out of the woods’ by the end of 2017 is highlighted in the latest report by Refugee Rights Europe (RRE). Still on the Streets: Documenting the situation for refugees and displaced people in Paris, France, presents statistical
Calendar of racism and resistance (6 – 19 April 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 5 April: Elder Rahimi solicitors publish: Systemic Delays in the Processing of the Claims for Asylum Made in the UK by Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC), download it here. 5 April: Asylum charities in Liverpool
Solidarity with human rights defenders intensifies
On 7 May, the trial of the crew of a search and rescue NGO ship who in January 2016 were saving lives in the Mediterranean will open in Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos. Danish-Iraqi national, Salam Aldeen (co-founder of Team Humanity), faces prosecution, alongside three Spanish fire-fighters, Manuel Blanco, Enrique Rodríguez and Julio
The ‘Windrush generation’ retreat and the hostile environment
The ‘Windrush generation’ of long-resident, elderly Commonwealth citizens has won a moral victory, with an apology from home secretary Amber Rudd and her predecessor, Theresa May, the architect of the ‘hostile environment’ policies which saw many of them dismissed from long-held jobs, denied housing and medical treatment, and threatened with deportation, for want of proof
Fighting the hostile environment: interview with Bethan Lant of Praxis
The shameful treatment of elderly Commonwealth citizens treated as illegal immigrants was brought to public attention by the Guardian’s report in March on the refusal of NHS cancer treatment to 63-year-old Londoner Albert Thompson. On 28 March, Frances Webber and Jessica Perera of IRR News went to visit Bethan Lant of Praxis, the organisation helping him,
We may be leaving Europe, but pan-European racism isn’t leaving us
Below we reproduce a talk given by the IRR’s Director, Liz Fekete, for the Parliament Roundtable on Racism & Hate Crime organised by the Monitoring Group on Monday 16 April 2018. I welcome this meeting which brings together so many campaigners dedicated to combating the violent racism that kills. After so many years of struggle, we now
Calendar of racism and resistance (23 March – 5 April 2018)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 22 March: The captain and head of mission of Proactiva Open Arms, an NGO rescue ship working in the Mediterranean, are arrested in Sicily for refusing to hand over the 218 people they saved in
Are the experts on radicalisation getting it wrong?
What, asks the April issue of Race & Class, has happened in policy and academia to the concept of ‘radicalisation’ that Arun Kundnani analysed in a pathbreaking piece, ‘Radicalisation: the journey of a concept’, some six years ago? In a far-reaching survey of published articles and commissioned government research over the last years, covering the