Solidarity protest at Red Road flats on 12 April. photo: Duncan Brown
The asylum seekers have had their claims for asylum refused even though most of their countries are too dangerous to return to. Their home countries include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Some people have received letters saying the locks on their doors would be changed in the next two weeks.
…
At 4.45pm on 21 June, No Borders and refugee solidarity activists blockaded the access road to the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook detention centres near Heathrow airport, to stop a mass deportation flight to Baghdad.
About 70 Iraqi refugees, mostly Kurds, were due to be flown out on a specially-chartered flight at 11pm. They had been assembled at the centres from other detention centres around the country, including 20 from Campsfield who were on hunger strike against deportation.
…On the face of it the past month has been headline horror for immigrants and asylum seekers in Britain and all those standing in solidarity with them: the continuing ordeal of Belfast’s Romanian families, forced to seek police protection from racist attacks, two seats in the European Parliament for the BNP, and the anti-migrant economic scaremongering, which appears to be one of the few things thriving in the current recession.
Scratch below surface, though, and you’ll find an…
This autumn, South Wales activist Babi Badalov was deported on a BMI flight to Azerbaijan despite having experienced physical abuse and state persecution there. An artist and poet, Babi was “guilty” of mocking the ruling elite. Hundreds of telephone calls, emails and faxes to BMI objecting to the airline’s role in Babi’s removal were ignored.
In 2007 the UK government deported 63,140 migrants. People deported are often handcuffed on the flight, and there have been a number reports…
Forced to leave their homes to escape war, persecution, starvation, disease and environmental disaster, thousands are denied the legal right to work or claim state benefits in Britain.
Some are provided shelter by members of their own ethnic communities. Spare Room find hosts for forced migrants without any other tolerable legal means of support. For example a Tamil-speaking Muslim woman from Sri Lanka forced to work for the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) was seized and abused by Sri Lankan…
I work for a group that helps refugees and asylum seekers, something which would not, I realise, send me to the top of the Christmas card list of the average Red Top editor or reader. Sometimes people ask me why I do it.
As I am not the kind of person who, poised like Rodin's Thinker, probes his deepest motives, I don't find this question easy to answer. Perhaps, though, some purpose might be served if I try to answer it here.
The group I work for is based in Hastings and…
I arrived in this country from Hungary in 1947 to three feet of snow in London and very little electricity.
The scars of war everywhere, bombed buildings, unheated rooms, horses and carts, very few cars, but a very efficient transport service, on buses and underground. The sounds around me were chirpy cockney, now rarely heard in London.
Alien registrationI had to register my movements and was issued with an identity card and a ration book for essential items. Books were…
Coventry Peace House is a housing co-op, a shelter, a base for community projects in Coventry, and a centre for campaigning. Coventry Peace House came out of the peace camp at Alvis Tanksin Coventry, when Penny and others wanted to start a community focused on nonviolence.
Ideally, members of the housing co-op (which is a member of the Radical Routes network) work part-time, so that they can pay their share of the rent and also have time to contribute to CPH work. The group chose…
During the summer holidays, I spent four days filming Iraqi Refugee children in Amman, Jordan.
When I returned back to England, I knew it was going to be fun editing the film but it was also going to be very hard and time consuming work.
Milan Rai and I spent one intensive week editing the film sometimes up to six hours a day.
I had a lot of footage. We managed to make 20 minutes of a rough copy.
I also worked on my own, editing more footage on my laptop…
The world became less peaceful for the third successive year in 2010-11, according to the Global Peace Index compiled by Australia’s Institute for Economics and Peace.
The index estimated the cost of war and insecurity to the global economy at £5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 43.7 million people were displaced in 2010 as the result of war and conflict, the highest number recorded this millennium.
On 15 November, 120 asylum seekers protested in Glasgow’s George Square after receiving letters stating that they are to be removed without consent to alternative accommodation. The letters state that they can be moved to any region in Scotland, a huge concern for families whose children are now established in Glasgow schools.
The forced removals are a consequence of the UK Border Agency cancelling a contract with Glasgow City Council after failure to agree over costs. The…
We actually did it: No Borders Calais organised a successful week-long music festival (6-12 September 2010) in Calais, one of the shittest towns in Europe, in the teeth of the French police and the local authorities, with no publicity at all, a few hundred euros, and little of what you could call organisation. And some of us say it was just about the best party we’ve ever been to.
It’s safe now to let the cat out of the bag: anyhow there’s a crop of videos up on YouTube already, and…
25 June 2010, Steenokkerzeel by the airport outside Brussels, 60 people occupy the building site of the new 127 tris immigration detention centre, shutting down work for a day, taking direct action against the construction site, and upping the ante in a campaign of resistance against the border regime in Belgium.
Over the past year: successful blockades of most of the six existing detention centres, including the simultaneous blockade of Bruges and Vottem by over 150 people last…
On 18 May, UK immigration minister Damian Green announced there would be no more child detainees at Dungavel, Scotland’s immigration removal centre.
Good news you might think? Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister has welcomed the announcement, allowing him to make the high moral claim that no children are imprisoned in Scotland. But the consequence for refugee families is a traumatic removal to England in sealed vans. Families will be isolated from their friends, and personal…
Sometimes a place – it could be a town, a camp, a crossing, or some muddy field – becomes a concentration point, a sink, a trap, for all the latent evil of the system of power that surrounds it.
Calais is not just a symbol of the brutality of the European border regime, of the violence of colonialism turned inwards and compressed by “Fortress Europe”.
The repression and misery here is very real, every day. Calais is the only town where the French police division…
