In the latest issue of the IRR’s journal Race & Class, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose ask why and how a small Middle Eastern country has successfully positioned itself as ‘European’, even though it is in breach of Europe’s humanitarian conventions and condemned by many UN resolutions. Not only have there been no international sanctions
Theme: Violence and harassment
Action on the EU Return Directive
Asylum campaigners are urging action as the European Parliament prepares to vote, on 18 June 2008, on the ‘Return Directive’. The ‘Return Directive’, if passed, will allow EU member states to: Detain non-EU migrants for up to 18 months; Detain and deport migrants including vulnerable people, unaccompanied minors (under 18 years of age) and pregnant
Discrimination in the name of integration
The UK government should heed the lessons from a recent report criticising the Netherlands for discriminatory pre-immigration tests for migrants. Lessons from the Netherlands In the UK, ‘active citizenship’ is one of the shibboleths in the government’s green paper The Path to Citizenship: next steps in reforming the immigration system. According to a new report
Distorted integration debate must be challenged
Islamophobia is running rough-shod over the whole integration debate. The social and economic issues minority ethnic communities in Europe face are hardly ever discussed and marginalisation and exclusion are put down to one factor – Islam. This was the message that the IRR sought to convey at the launch of the findings of its one-year
New report says Islamophobia warps integration efforts
On 14 May, BME activists, educationalists and professionals working within Muslim communities and on integration issues from five European countries will meet to publicly discuss the findings of the Institute of Race Relations’ pan-European research project into Integration, Islamophobia and civil rights in Europe. Liz Fekete, the report’s author said: ‘The clash in Europe is
Document on student extremism seriously flawed
New policies being recommended to prevent extremism on campuses are aimed at the wrong target and could promote division and fear within the student body. There are times in life – and politics – that you encounter a straightforward lie. Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons. The local council is giving asylum seekers free mobile phones.
Racial violence in Ireland
Despite a rise of serious racial attacks, authorities in Ireland are still in denial about racism. The events of the last month have been sobering for anti racism and social justice in Ireland. On 22 February two young Polish workers Marius Szwajkos and Pawel Kalite, who had been in Ireland for just a year, were
Rehabilitating Enoch Powell
This week, BBC 2 begins a controversial ‘White season’ which asks ‘is white working class Britain becoming invisible?’ and includes a programme by Denys Blakeway on Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood intervention forty years ago. IRR’s director, A. Sivanandan, contributed to the programme ‘Rivers of Blood’ due to be shown on 8 March at 9pm
Southall Black Sisters threatened by withdrawal of funds
Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a long-standing domestic violence support group serving BME women, is facing possible closure after having key funding withdrawn from the Conservative-run, Ealing Council. Despite the fact that SBS has received national and international recognition for the support it has given Black and Asian women in West London over the course of
A human rights framework and the fight for race equality
After a Human Rights Awareness event which included discussion with the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR) the director of Oldham Race Equality Partnership was provoked into making observations about the implications of a human rights framework in the fight for race equality. There is an enormous momentum at the moment towards submerging local race