Thursday, 2 May 2024 — Institute of Race Relations
As our calendar of racism and resistance shows, within days of the passage of the Safety of Rwanda Act, which received Royal Assent last week, and days before local elections in England, the Home Office began detaining asylum seekers as they arrived for routine immigration bail appointments and rounding them up nationwide in immigration raids, as if they were public enemies – which the government tries to pretend they are – and protesters against the Act, demonstrating outside immigration centres are being arrested too. No wonder increasing numbers of terrified asylum seekers are fleeing from Britain to Ireland, whose supreme court has ruled that since the Rwanda deal, the UK is no longer a safe country to which asylum seekers can be returned.
Now, as the Irish government seeks its own emergency legislation to allow the return of asylum seekers here, Rishi Sunak is saying his government will not take them back. The passage of the Act exemplifies the government’s ditching of all considerations of decency, legality and international relations in its rush to salvage a few votes. As the UN’s refugee and human rights chiefs point out, the Act is an abdication of responsibility for refugees which sets a ‘worrying’ global precedent.
As we have become painfully aware in recent months, migrants and asylum seekers are not the only groups subjected to hostile environment policies, which are now being directed at the Palestinian diaspora in Europe, whose very identity and existence is being erased and criminalised in an attempt to force them out of public life. Those
demanding, whether on the streets or at universities, an end to the Israel-Palestine war and justice for Palestinians, are subjected to aggressive restrictions and other hostile measures. While sit-ins at the Sciences Po university and the Sorbonne in Paris have come under attack from university authorities, police, and reportedly the prime minister, it is Berlin where unparallelled force has been used to break up Free Palestine events such as the Palestine Congress and the Occupy Against Occupation camp outside parliament. Meanwhile, the case of internationally renowned feminist and legal expert Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian-Israeli professor who has been detained in Israel, illustrates the interaction between the hostile environment for those without citizenship, and the hostile environment against Palestinians. Queen Mary’s University of London, where Dr Shalhoub-Kevorkian is global chair of law, has failed to condemn her arrest. Over 250 academics at QMUL have signed an open letter calling on the university authorities to do more to support her.
IRR News team
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe.
Calendar of Racism & Resistance
Calendar of Racism and Resistance, we highlight stories unfolding over the past two weeks in asylum and migrant rights, human rights and discrimination, policing and anti-Palestinian racism in the UK and Europe.
Find these stories and thousands more on our Register of Racism and Resistance database.
New Race & Class
Systemic injustice and the criminal legal system
Racism seeps into every aspect of criminal ‘justice’ and radical scholars are exposing the breadth and depth of the issue. The April 2024 issue of Race & Class contains cutting-edge articles on the criminal legal system, adding to a growing number of campaigns voices rejecting the normalisation of systemic injustice in the courts.
Drill rap lyrics are used regularly by police and prosecutors as plausible evidence against young Black working-class defendants in UK criminal cases. In the lead article, ‘Racist inferences and flawed data: drill rap lyrics as criminal evidence in group prosecutions’, Eithne Quinn, professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, examines state interpretations of drill lyrics in the preparation of serious crime cases, focusing on a 2020 joint enterprise murder case in London. By forensically unpacking the way the state uses violent rap lyrics to build secondary liability in group prosecutions, she shows how drill lyrics are quoted to invoke popular stereotypes and even mislead the court.
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