Dear IRR News subscriber, This weekend, campaigners in Oxford mark twenty-one years since the opening of Campsfield House immigration removal centre by calling for it to be shut down. But the Home Office, apparently, has other plans. Proposals in the pipeline could lead to the doubling of the size of the centre – in-line with
Calendar of racism and resistance (14 – 27 November 2014)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum seekers and refugees 14 November: It is revealed that an unnamed language analyst working for Swedish firm Sprakab, is a convicted drug smuggler whose expert reports have been used to refuse asylum to hundreds in the UK.
Neglect and indifference kill American man in immigration detention
A Prison and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) report on Brian Dalrymple’s six weeks in immigration detention paints a grim picture of how the vulnerable are treated. Although Dalrymple was a white man, we report on his case to show that, in immigration detention, immigration status ensures a grim equality of treatment. The report, Investigation into the death of a
Home Office contractors ‘expected to lie’, inspection reveals
Phil Miller of Corporate Watch examines a recent report[1] from the prison inspectorate on charter deportations from the UK. Security guards from Capita subsidiary Tascor were ‘expected to lie’ to people about being deported, raising the risk of self-harm, a new report by the Prison Inspector Nick Hardwick reveals. Guards were also ‘asleep for significant’ periods
Landlord penalties and the right to housing
Forcing private landlords to police undocumented migrants will exacerbate inequality and deflect blame for the housing shortage. The drive to embed immigration enforcement into all aspects of economic and social life is about to become even more intrusive. From 1 December, in a pilot scheme, residential landlords in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall and Sandwell[1] will
IRR News 31 October – 13 November 2014
Dear IRR News subscriber, IRR News focuses this week on the Europe-wide plight of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. In September, a homeless Roma man from Romania, living in Sweden, died after a fire broke out at his tent camp. In the previous months, the location of Sweden’s temporary Roma camps had been disseminated online. Liz
Abandoning Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities … the UK way
Two new reports, prepared by the National Federation of Gypsy Liaison Groups (NFGLG), with the assistance of academic colleagues, ask hard questions of the coalition government. The European Commission (EC) gave the UK government an ‘overall poor rating’ for the progress report it delivered in 2012 on its Roma integration strategy. The EC uses ‘Roma’
Roma – fascism’s first victims, again
Anti-Roma violence draws strength from fascist ideas that linger on in mainstream European thought. On 15 September, a Roma man from Romania, homeless in Sweden, died of injuries sustained on 31 August, when a fire broke out at a Roma temporary tent camp in Högdalen, southern Stockholm. We will probably never know whether the man,
Redefining Gypsies and Travellers
Gypsy and Traveller groups are angrily responding to the coalition’s consultation document, which proposes to redefine who can be considered a Gypsy or Traveller for the purposes of meeting obligations under planning law. A new consultation paper on Planning and Travellers from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) proposes to redefine what a
The slippery, cynical politics of asylum
At the start of the run-up to the 2015 election, John Grayson, a campaigner in South Yorkshire, examines the main political parties’ line on asylum. ‘The UK has a proud history of offering sanctuary to those who need it.’ A Home Office spokeswoman on Channel 4 News after the disclosure that the Home Office had