Dear IRR News subscriber, This week Frances Webber reports on new measures for suspected terrorists and to get foreign offenders to leave the UK. Helen Hintjens reports on refugee protests in The Hague. And in a comment piece I ask whether charities today are working for the state. You can also download a bumper digest
Citizens UK – for the people or the state?
Is a human rights charity working too closely with the UK Border Agency (UKBA)? A recent HM Inspector of Prisons report into the privately-run Sandford House short-term holding facility states that: ‘Reliance’s detainee welfare forum minutes suggested that some diversity training by Citizens UK’ is ‘being rolled out.’[1] Citizens UK, when asked about this, told
More threats to legal rights of unwanted migrants
A number of coalition measures will have potentially disastrous consequences for migrants and asylum seekers. First, there is pressure to get foreign offenders to leave. When a Romanian shoplifter was banished from the UK for a year, as part of his community sentence, the High Court quashed the order in December 2012, saying that exclusion
IRR News 22 December 2012 – 4 January 2013
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week Frances Webber reports on news that Capita has been wrongly telling people to leave the UK and we also republish an article (from the Slough Times) on a vigil held in Slough on 27 December to mark the deaths in police custody of Philimore Mills and Habib ‘Paps’ Ullah.
Capita wrongly telling people to leave the UK
Outsourcing of enforcement role causes confusion and distress as many are wrongly targeted. In the second and third weeks of December 2012, as businesses wound down for Christmas and MPs went home, thousands of migrants, including students, workers and investors, received text messages or emails telling them they had no lawful leave to be in
Protest vigil: stop deaths in police custody
Below we publish an edited version of an article that appeared in the Slough Times on a demonstration that took place at the end of December. On a dark and cold winter evening protesters campaigning for justice for the two men who died in Thames Valley Police’s custody held a peaceful vigil outside Slough police.
Revealing the impact of immigration detention
Two recent reports add fuel to growing demands to rethink indefinite immigration detention. On any given day between January and March 2012, 3,500 people were held in immigration detention, of whom over forty had been there for over two years: the equivalent of a four-year prison sentence, for being a refused asylum seeker, overstayer or
IRR News 12-21 December 2012
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week we publish an interview with the IRR’s A. Sivanandan on Ed Miliband’s recent speech. Liz Fekete assesses the recent deaths of asylum seekers across Europe and the resistance springing up in response, and Frances Webber reviews two recent reports that detail the impact of indefinite immigration detention. And in
Miliband’s progress?
A. Sivanandan, known for his trenchant critiques of government ‘race’ policies, has broadly welcomed what Ed Miliband had to say last week. IRR News asks him why. What’s new about the Miliband speech? It seems to carry many of the same old themes – need to curtail immigration, need to integrate and so on. It
From despair comes resistance
Asylum-seekers and migrants across Europe are determined to change the inhuman circumstances of their existence. In his new book Fortress Europe: dispatches from a gated continent, journalist Matthew Carr describes a protest in Lombardy in which five migrants climbed to the top of a crane above Brescia’s new light railway line. ‘For seventeen days they