The deportation of all foreign criminals is the latest populist campaign of the right-wing press. The Mail and the Telegraph have long since campaigned against the Human Rights Act. Their long-running campaign to prevent prisoners born outside the UK from relying on their rights to family and private life to avoid deportation once released, is
Theme: Violence and harassment
Why did Aminullah die?
French social services have been accused of failing a seventeen-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who apparently took his own life. On 10 June Le Monde reported that Aminullah, a young asylum seeker from Afghanistan who had dreamed of becoming a plumber, committed suicide in Paris, three months before his eighteenth birthday. The full facts of the
Deprivation of citizenship – by stealth
Lawyer Amanda Weston, at a seminar at the IRR, described the impact that the loss of appeal rights under deprivation of citizenship clauses has had on those affected and their families. When David Blunkett informed Abu Hamza of the decision to deprive him of his British citizenship in April 2003,[1] there hadn’t been a similar
Eastern European workers under attack
Racist attacks on Eastern Europeans and, in particular, migrant workers continue to occur regularly and are being perpetuated by policies which foster destitution. Earlier this month, speaking through a translator from a hospital bed in Exeter, where he had spent the last three weeks, Daniel Sobieraj pleaded for information regarding three men who attacked him
Child detention still inhumane
Despite Clegg’s pronouncements that ‘one of the most child-friendly immigration systems in the developed world’ is being implemented, the harshness of the government’s new strategies for detaining and deporting children is now becoming clear. The ‘end'[1] of the detention of children in immigration removal centres came after a long fought campaign uniting a diverse array
Understanding the European-wide assault on multiculturalism
In singling out multiculturalism as a threat to national identity, the leaders of Europe’s centre-right parties are using the same kind of rhetoric and specious arguments as Enoch Powell did forty years ago. The leaders of mainstream political parties across Europe are, one after the other, announcing the death of multiculturalism in their countries. They
The attacks on multiculturalism are linked to the economic crisis
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today Understanding the European-wide assault on multiculturalism – a detailed analysis by Executive Director, Liz Fekete, of key speeches made over the past six months by leading centre-right politicians from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. These speeches attack multiculturalism and immigration
New immigration rules cause alarm
Domestic violence victims will be forced to stay with violent partners, lawyers say. As from 21 April, people who came to Britain to join British or settled migrant partners and seek settlement with them after the two-year probationary period, or have been forced to leave them through domestic violence, must have a clean criminal record
Learn the language – how?
David Cameron blames immigrants for not learning the language at the same time as the government launches devastating cuts to English language learning provision for migrants and refugees. In his speech to Conservative party members in Hampshire, Cameron highlighted the important role that the English language plays in good integration through binding ‘real communities’ together
Germany: Campaign to overturn headscarf bans launched
The Berlin organisation ReachOut has launched a campaign to rescind the 2003 Law on Neutrality that opened the way for the German states (Länder) to ban the headscarf. Over half of Germany’s sixteen states now ban students and civil servants (including teachers) from wearing the headscarf. The authority to do so comes from the 2003