A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum seekers and refugees 6 October: Corporate Watch reveals that NHS England has awarded G4S a series of contracts worth some £23 million to run medical facilities at four immigration removal centres in the UK. (Corporate Watch, 6
This graphic account of the plight of the undocumented in Amsterdam first appeared on the web site Dreaming in Exile. Since 2012, a group of people from a number of countries have formed a group in Amsterdam called ‘We Are Here’. There are men and women, old and young. Some have been here for many years.
A Human Rights Watch report, criticising Israel’s inhumane treatment of African asylum seekers, provides an opportunity to reflect on the extension of the Prevention of Infiltration Law, first used against Palestinians in 1954. In recent weeks, Israeli nationalists, including ministers from the far-right Jewish Home party, have marched through the streets of Tel Aviv, with
A compelling documentary by Standoff Films lays bare the horror of Campsfield immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire. When Injustice, Ken Fero’s pathbreaking 2001 documentary about black deaths in custody was recently re-shown on London’s South Bank, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw was part of the post-screening panel. Bradshaw, describing his shock when he first watched
A personal account of the everyday problems encountered by one eastern European attempting to make a new life in the UK. I should have realised from the start that Elena lived in a fairy land with her God. I had broken my arm in the snow and we needed help in the house. She came
An impressive new film on the death of Mark Duggan, and the riots that followed, provides a welcome radical alternative narrative. Ken Fero’s new film, Burn, (dedicated to those who burn for justice) describes itself as a movie about memory. He asks ‘why Britain burns?’ and there are a variety of responses, but the consensus
The latest issue of Race & Class, ‘Memory and hope’, contains a special section on the possibilities for peace and autonomy in Kashmir. As the ceasefire along the Line of Control breaks down and Pakistani and Indian troops are involved in a new outbreak of hostilities causing 20,000 civilians to flee their homes, Race &
The treatment of a homeless French man who died in immigration detention makes grim reading and shows up a callous system. On 26 September, nearly two years after the inquest, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) published a fatal incident report into the death on 6 December 2011 of an unnamed 40-year-old French man in
Dear IRR News subscriber, The 1980s was a time when the New Right, with its most influential journal The Salisbury Review, edited by Roger Scruton, had a poisonous hold over mainstream debates on race, nation and culture. Now, in the wake of the ‘no’ vote in the Scottish referendum, David Cameron is building an ever-divisive
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting the key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum seekers and refugees September: The ECtHR rules that conditions for migrants detained in a number of Greek police stations and immigration detention centres are so bad that they amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment, in two
