Background
Whats this No Borders stuff all about?
Recent wildcat strikes by construction workers against the divide-and-rule tactics of unscrupulous European firms, and the rolling out of ID cards to foreign nationals in the UK are reminders that we are increasingly living in a heavily controlled ‘Fortress Europe’. At the same time, you don’t need a crystal ball to see that the economic recession will be used by the far right to scapegoat immigrant workers and other migrants.
In Scotland, in recent years, there have been major successes in defeating efforts by the Home Office to escalate their barbaric dawn raids on asylum seekers. As a direct result of this success, over eight hundred families in Glasgow have been granted Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK. Crucially, direct action and community resistance played a central role in this campaign.
Freedom – but not for all
From Bristol No Borders: http://bristolnoborders.wordpress.com/
By Frances Webber
17 June 2010, 5:00pm
The government’s much vaunted freedom agenda entrenches a two-tier system of rights, with migrants and other unpopular minorities largely excluded.
On 25 May 2010, the Queen’s speech promised: ‘Legislation will be brought forward to restore freedoms and civil liberties, through the abolition of Identity Cards and repeal of unnecessary laws.’ The following day, 26 May 2010, the Identity Documents Bill was introduced into parliament. Its provisions cancel the UK national identity card and the identification card for EEA nationals, and abolish the National Identity Register (NIR). Nick Clegg, introducing the Bill, described the ID card scheme as ‘wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive’ and claimed the Bill was a major step towards dismantling the ‘surveillance state’.
But non-EU citizens, who are required to hold biometric identity cards, are untouched by these proposals: the Bill does not include them, and the National Biometric Identity Service (NBIS), a scheme set up in 2009 under a £265 million contract with IBM, appears to be going ahead, according to the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA). Because the NBIS is non-statutory, it contains none of the safeguards of the NIR – and UK Border Agency has and uses vast powers of information-gathering on foreign nationals. There is no indication from the new government that these powers will be abandoned or curtailed.
In opposition, the Lib Dems’ so-called Freedom Bill, published for the Convention on Modern Liberty in January 2009, contained a large number of proposals to restore and enhance civil liberties, including halving the period of detention without charge of terrorist suspects from twenty-eight to fourteen days, repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (which imposes draconian control orders on suspected terrorists), restoring the freedom to demonstrate outside parliament and restricting the length of time criminal suspects’ fingerprints can be retained by police – and many other measures. But there was no proposal to abolish fingerprinting of asylum seekers and certain migrants, and other clauses restricting police powers contained exceptions for immigration.
By 20 May 2010, when the coalition agreement, with its commitment to restore civil liberties was published, even these proposals had been diluted, softened or simply disappeared. The Lib Dems’ proposals in relation to counter-terrorism had been replaced by a commitment to introduce ‘safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation’. The proposal to restrict police retention of fingerprints had gone, replaced by a commitment to ‘outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission’. And the coalition’s commitment to restore the right to peaceful protest did not refer to Parliament Square – and as Conor Gearty pointed out (London Review of Books 10 June 2010), was accompanied by the noise of police evicting non-violent protesters from the square. CCTV cameras are not to be dismantled but will instead be regulated.
These particular dilutions are significant. Among the resident population it is disproportionately black people whose fingerprints are taken (and retained) by police, while recently, many of those who engage in peaceful protest are Muslim, a hugely disproportionate number of those stopped and searched under terrorism laws are black, and all (or virtually all) of those arrested or subjected to control orders under the Prevention of Terrorism Act are Muslim. And in May 2010 it was revealed that Muslim areas of Birmingham have comprehensive CCTV coverage, paid for by the Prevent programme (but sold to residents purely as an anti-crime initiative).
The Freedom or Great Repeal Bill has not yet been published. But when it is, black, Muslim and migrant communities will be watching to see whether they are included in deputy prime minister Nick Clegg’s, promise, in his 19 May 2010 speech, of ‘sweeping legislation to restore the hard-won liberties that have been taken one by one from the British people’. So far, the signs are not good.
It has been instructive watching the way the media in the UK, and those who were actually caught up in the ‘chaos’, have reacted to the consequences of the suspension of air travel in Western Europe courtesy of Eyjafjallajokull, have reacted to the inability to travel as of where and when one expects and desires. After all this is one’s ‘right’ if one has the correct passport, the money and, above all, the expectation to be allowed to “pass freely without let or hindrance”.
Instead, travellers found themselves stuck at internal (airports and train stations) and external (ports) borders unable to proceed, to get to where they wanted to be. They found themselves, when they could not afford the hotel bills, having to rough it: sleeping in uncomfortable and often increasingly squalid conditions, on floors and in chairs (the modern equivalent of the park bench?) in departure lounges, wherever they could or were allowed to doss down and wait for the opportunity to proceed; unable to shower and having to wear the same clothes for days on end.
And, of course, the major trope of the UK media coverage was the stoic British / ’Dunkirk’ spirit: the endless queuing and resigned complaining; the polite exasperation at bureaucracy and the lack of information; and the apparent propensity of the (largely European) businesses to seize the opportunity to ‘profiteer’ and make a quick Euro by putting up the price of dwindling resources such as hotel rooms, hire cars, train and ferry tickets was one of the subtexts.* Fortunately, that picture that was counterbalanced by the large number of people interviewed who chose to highlight the positive nature of their experiences, the solidarity and general helpfulness of others and the sheer liberatory adventure of having boring routine existence confounded.
However, from the viewpoint of those of us involved in the struggle against borders and who understand the futility of the concept of the ‘nation state’, the most astonishing and overtly hypocritical feature of the media’s coverage of the whole episode was what occurred in Calais, that transport-bottleneck between continental Europe (and ‘Johnnie Foreigner’) and ‘home’ (‘Dear Old Blighty’).
First, we had the bizarre sight of some minor BBC celebrity deciding to try and do his very minor bit to try and revive the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ (sic) by taking a handful of inflatable speedboats across the Channel to ‘liberate’ ‘stranded’ UK passengers supposedly stuck on the other side of the water (just what he expected to achieve by shuttling a few dozen people back to Dover when the ferries manage to carry tens of thousands of passengers a day is a bit hard to fathom, but that’s celebrities for you!). Only to be frustrated by the collective deadweight of Border bureaucracy, as the Calais port officials (after apparently initially OK’ing the enterprise, only to have second, and probably job-saving, thoughts) passed the buck up the bureaucratic command chain till the Prefect of the Pas de Calais vetoed the whole scheme and the combined Stuka squadrons of EU border policy sank his little ego-fuelled enterprise.
The other vomit-inducing spectacle was the endless shots, hourly updated just in case we failed to grasp the apparent monumental significance (or maybe it was purely one of those endless non-news creating side effects of the 24 hour news experience?) of more bloody Brits queuing for tickets, this time for an average 3 hours we were helpfully informed, in order to get on a Calais-Dover ferry. And to top it all, the Red Cross, who many years before had run another less favourably received humanitarian project in the area called Sangatte, was out in force, handing out cups of tea and emergency blankets to combat the overnight cold to the endless line of people snaking across the ferry terminal car park, as they slowly made their way to the ticket office windows, only 3 of which were open we were also helpfully told (it’s amazing the fact one accumulates from watching 24 hour news).
Now, not demeaning in any way the trauma some people experienced whilst having their comfortable and ordered lives so disrupted by the suspension of air travel for a few days, but the errant hypocrisy of this non-epic saga (the only good think we can say about it is that it cleared the airwaves of some of the interminable coverage of the election) was mind boggling in the extreme.
Has no one noticed the irony that the few days of discomfort experienced by a bunch of privileged Westerners, temporarily stranded on the journey to England by the Calais ‘bottleneck’, occurred in precisely the same town that has been the host of a very different, and largely untold, story of the discomfort (and more) for a group of people also stranded on their journey to England by exactly the same barrier?
Except they have often been stranded for years rather than days and their barrier has added 4m high double fences topped with razor wire to contend with, plus a massive security operation armed with EU laws, CO2 and infra red detectors, sniffer dogs, Eurodac, Schengen, etc. All policed by hundreds of borders guards, CRS and PAF cops; subjected to routine tear-gassing whilst one sleeps in the ‘Jungles’, the sort of shanty town structures that would never pass muster in even the worst fevala; to casual officially-sanctioned brutality, arrest and overnight detention; evictions, theft and destruction of ones personal property; not to mention the exploitation by the trafficking gangs who control the truck-stops and lay-bys and who are more than willing to main or even kill anyone who crosses them (one of the inevitable problems of criminalising a whole class of people is that one renders them open to exploitation by the only people they can turn to themselves for any form of ‘help’, criminals).
And then there is the sort of maiming and killing, that which occurs because of the extremes that these marginalized and desperate people are driven to in order to get to where they want to be, injuries and death in the backs or under the wheels of lorries and on the train tracks in the Channel Tunnel, just the sort of thing that happened to a 16 years old Afghan named Ramahdin just day before the volcano erupted. On April 11 he was hiding under a lorry that was boarding a ferry at Loon-Plage just up the coast from Calais but was found crushed to death. His repatriated body was then caught up in the air traffic chaos at a German airport en route back to Afghanistan.
Yes, these people, refugees from their own countries, are driven to do desperate and dangerous things. Driven by fear of persecution, by desperation and poverty. They have been displaced by Western-led wars fought in their homelands, by Western-inspired post-colonial structural debt-induced poverty; by environmental degradation created by multinational mining company operations or IMF-financed dam building and by civil wars in which both sides have been armed by the same Western arms companies. They have been lured westwards by the global hegemony of the Hollywood lifestyle, Rolex watches and Versace jeans (the modern equivalent of 40 acres and a mule, except in reverse, luring people into a form of slavery), to realise Dick Whittington’s dream in a land where the streets are supposed to be paved with gold.
Where are the stories of their epic journeys, which sometimes take years; tales of the circuitous routes that they have had to take to try and get where they wanted to be, to a new safer ‘home’. Where is the outrage at the exorbitant prices they had to pay (often with their own lives) to get there, only to find themselves stuck in limbo, unable to ultimately get where they most want to be because they were born in the wrong place and have the wrong passport/visa/skin colour? And this untold story is not just happening in Calais. It is the same, if not worse, in Ceuta, Melilla, Libya, Turkey, the Canaries, Malta, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, Slovenia, the Ukraine, Mexico, etc. The list is almost endless.
But hey! Let’s look on the bright side. At least the people ‘stranded’ by Eyjafjallajokull’s dust clouds, when they finally did get to take the journey across the Channel to England, whether it was by ferry or Eurostar, didn’t travel terrified by the fear that their long, torturous journey may all have been in vain, that they might be caught by Border guards once they reached the ‘green and promised land’ and be deported back to some detention centre hell-hole in mainland Europe, or even worse, back to a war zone or somewhere where they face the fear of torture or death.
Unfortunately, it seems that some travel stories are far less newsworthy and will not be preserved in anyone’s album of treasured holiday snapshots.
http://nobordersbrighton.blogspot.com/2010/04/as-dust-settles.html
Media Defends Bigots!
Good day for media… This morning Nick Griffin gets a breakfast slot to fuel racism and hatred on BBC Radio 4. And the rest of the day is taken up with ‘bigotgate’. Brown accidentally caught on tape in his car, referring to someone he’d just spoken to – who’d been moaning about immigrants ‘flocking in’ – as a ‘bigoted woman’. Press pounce, delighted; bigot-woman is interviewed ad nauseum expressing her ‘disgust’ at the PM’s comments; in general the country is ‘shocked’. Or that’s how it’s portrayed by every single media establishment, it seems. There are not many calls for Gillian Duffy, and all the xenophobic ‘not racist but…’ people like her, to apologise for their comments or views. Milena Popova’s article about the failure of the ‘fluffy’ left and the media to defend immigrants is here, along with the clip, should you wish to see it yet again…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/gillian-duffy-eastern-european
Obviously Brown’s comments don’t seem particularly heroic given the past ten years of Labour’s noxious immgration ministers, mass deportation, expansion of detention sites and child detention, racist abuse at the hands of private companies, rocketing refusal rates, and the militarisation of European and British borders. But it’s interesting to see the backlash when he does voice – albeit accidentally – a single comment on latent racism in this country.
from http://news.pinkpaper.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=2756
A leading UK charity for lesbian and gay asylum seekers published a study this week which highlights disproportionate levels of rejection for homosexual applicants.
The UK Lesbian & Gay Immigration Group – a charity promoting equality and dignity through supporting lesbian and gay people who are seeking asylum in the UK – conducted a study of 50 Home Office Reason for Refusal letters issued from 2005 to 2009 to claimants from 19 different countries who claimed asylum on the basis of their sexual identity.
Entitled Failing The Grade, the report looks at the decisions of UK Border Agency at interview stage. They found that although refusal at this stage is high for all asylum applicants – 73% in 2009 – refusal of lesbian and gay applicants between 2004 and 2009 was 98-99%.
UKLGIG patron Angela Mason, CBE, – who was joined by barrister S. Chelvan and author of the report, Laura Milliken Gray, at its launch at London’s Mitre House Chambers – told DIVA that the issue was a live one.
“It seems clear that case owners making decisions about lesbian and gay asylum claims do not have training on the particular issues arising from persecution based on sexual orientation or identity.
They are also relying on out of date information on countries of origin and too often ignoring the UNHCR Guidance Note on Refugee Claims Relating to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. The result is that lesbian and gay asylum seekers who are already experiencing persecution may also face discrimination in our own country.”
Benjamin Update
Thanks to all who have sent letters/ emailed/phoned/faxed in solidarity with Benjamin!
Benjamin (Hussein Karimyon) didn’t fly last week, and a judicial review of his case has been granted by the court.
Benjamin is now back in Glasgow, but more action maybe needed in the future, so keep an eye out for updates.
Benjamin, an Iranian asylum seeker involved in campaigns in Calais and in Glasgow, faces deportation to Greece on Wednesday, under the Dublin Convention. He faces immediate danger both in Greece and Iran. Please take the time to fax British Airways and the Home Office to protest his deportation, quoting his HO ref below. Templates you can use for the faxes are here:
Letter to Home Secretary regarding Hussein Karimyon
Letter to BA regarding Hussein Karimyon
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Please help Hussein Karimyon (Benjamin)
Home Office Ref K1307066/2
Hussein Karimyon, known as Benjamin to his friends, is a 37-year old Iranian human rights campaigner. Detained by the UK Border Agency and facing imminent deportation, he urgently needs your help and solidarity.
Hussein is an Iranian who had to flee his country after 1 ½ years imprisonment and torture for opposing the oppressive regime. On escaping to Europe as a political refugee, Benjamin found no sanctuary in Greece, where he suffered further abuse: imprisonment in awful conditions, beatings, denied essential medication.
Hussein managed to escape from Greece, and despite his dangerous position without immigration status he has continued to fight for human rights. In Calais, Hussein instigated a hunger strike against his treatment by the authorities, to highlight the life-threatening situation he was in. The hunger strike was violently stopped by the French riot police and Hussein was put into a detention centre in Calais.
Since reaching the UK in October 2009 and applying for asylum, he has been active as a volunteer with the Unity Centre in Glasgow, until he was detained on 2nd March when he went to report at the Home Office. Under a European Union agreement, the UK government intends to forcibly return Hussein to Greece on Wednesday 10th March – despite the very strong evidence that asylum seekers there face such limited access to justice and to welfare support that the treatment amounts to an abuse of human rights.
Hussein would be again in serious danger if returned to Iran, but even the return to Greece would be a serious risk to his wellbeing. The situation in Greece is appalling. Hussein suffers from many health problems due to his mistreatment and is reliant on heart medication (which was previously confiscated during his time in Greece). Since being in Glasgow he has been to hospital 3 times, for treatment of spinal problems, loss of eye sight and fainting. Hussein has stated that he would rather die than be sent back to Greece. Subsequent deportation to Iran would put him back into the hands of those who regularly imprison, torture and execute political opponents. He must be allowed to stay in the UK. (for more on the situation in Greece and Iran, see below)
To send Hussein back to Iran could be a death sentence. His life will be in serious danger, as will the life of his family, if he is returned.
Hussein has many friends in the UK and has begun a life in Glasgow, where he is attending English classes, and is an active member of the community. He has travelled for many years to reach the UK, being persecuted along the way, and we ask that he is given the opportunity to make his asylum claim in the UK. His solicitor has been unable to visit him as he has been moved from the detention centre in Glasgow to Manchester, and is due to be moved to London. His representatives have had little time to prepare a case.
What you can do to help:
Please show your solidarity by contacting the Home Secretary and British Airways to ask that Hussein’s flight be stopped and that he be released from detention immediately.
1) Contact British Airways to stop the flight.
1Email/Phone Willie Walsh, Chief Executive Officer British Airways and urge him not to carry out deportation flights, including the forced removal of Hussein Karimyon.
Please quote flight number BA640 to Athens , Greece, on Wednesday 10th March 08.00.
A model letter is attached. You can copy, amend or write your own version and add your address at the top – if you do please include all the following details:
Please do not remove Hussein Karimyon Ref K1307066/2, due to be forcibly removed from the UK on Wednesday 8 March 2010 @ 08:00 on British Airways flight BA640.
Email: willie.walsh@ba.com
Customer Relations phone: 0844 493 0 787 Monday-Friday 08:00-18:30 (hold line till operator answers)
2. Also contact Alan Johnson, Home Secretary
Ask him to exercise his discretionary powers to stop the flight, to release Hussein Karimyon from detention and to grant him protection in the UK.
If you are writing your own letter or email, please include Home Office Reference number: K1307066/2
Phone: +44 (0)20 7035 4848 or 0870 606 7766
Fax: + 44 (0)20 7219 5856 and (0)20 8760 3132
By Email:
Or: public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Privateoffice.external@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
UKBApublicenquiries@UKBA.gsi.gov.uk
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Read more about the situation in Greece, and the use of the Dublin Convention to forcibly remove asylum seekers from the UK, here:
Twins aged five taken to Dungavel
A Church of Scotland minister has spoken out after two five-year-old boys were taken to the Dungavel detention centre in their school uniforms.
Reverend Ian Galloway spoke out following the detention of Nigerian twins Joshua and Joel Ovranah, and their mother, Stephanie.
He said it was the “latest example of young children being put in distressing circumstances”.
The UK Border Agency said it had “no option” but to detain the family.
It is understood immigration officials transported the two boys and their mother to the centre in South Lanarkshire after the family had gone to sign on at Brand Street Immigration Centre in Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon.
Mr Galloway, the convener of the Church and Society Council, said the boys had come straight from St Rose of Lima Primary in Glasgow’s east end, and were wearing their school uniform as officials transported them to the detention centre.
“ It is a horrific experience for anyone to go through, not least for two five-year-old boys ”
Reverend Muriel Pearson
The family had been involved in activities through the Cranhill Community Project in Glasgow, and had also been attending Cranhill Parish Church, he added.
Mr Galloway said: “The General Assembly along with many others in Scotland have expressed their abhorrence at the practice of detaining young children and have asked the Scottish government to end this brutal and inhumane regime.”
Stephanie Ovranah arrived in the UK in 2006 when her boys were infants after fleeing domestic violence at the hands of her partner and his mother in Nigeria.
Her own mother and sister are in London, with leave to remain.
She claims that her partner will forcibly take the boys from her if she is sent back to Nigeria.
Reverend Muriel Pearson, who visited the family on Thursday at the detention centre, said it was likely they would be transferred to Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, which would isolate the family further.
‘Last resort’
Ms Pearson said: “Our church members question the need to detain the family, since Stephanie does not pose a flight risk.
“Visitors have all their belongings removed, are photographed and have finger print recognition done.
“It is a horrific experience for anyone to go through, not least for two five-year-old boys.”
A spokesman for the UK Border Agency said: “Each case is considered on its own merits. We expect those who have been found by the UK Border Agency and the independent courts not to have a right to be here, to leave voluntarily and detention remains a last resort.
“If however someone refuses to leave we will not hesitate to find ways to remove them”.
A statement released by the agency said it would prefer not to detain families with children, but when they failed to leave voluntarily there was no option “but to detain them to enforce their departure”.
“We consider it generally better for children to remain with their parents/guardians when in this situation and they are therefore usually detained for just a few days prior to their scheduled as part of a family group”, the statement added.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/scotland/8552626.stm
Every year thousands of asylum seekers are detained in Britain. They are held while the Home Office decides whether to grant their claim for asylum or to remove them from the country. Its part of what is supposed to be a faster and more effective system for dealing with asylum. But there are claims that the government is routinely breaching its own guidelines — and detaining vulnerable asylum seekers unlawfully. Rob Walker speaks to former detainees and to a former case worker in the UK Border Agency who claims there is a culture of disbelief towards asylum seekers.
Listen to the programme below
Movement Issue 4 Available
Here’s the slightly delayed latest issue of Movement, events over the last few weeks have meant this issue has changed a few times before publication. As is often a problem with print media our two cover stories may develop considerably within hours of publication. You can keep up to date with these stories and more on the Movement website, which hosts extensive links from across the movement for freedom of movement and equality for all (and beyond).
Articles this issue include:
- Hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood
- New migrant solidarity centre in Calais
- Arora Detention centre plans defeated
- No Deportations to Nigeria
- Life’s too short to be controlled
- Overpopulation Myths
- UKBA Whistleblower speaks out
- No Borders National Gathering
- Plus the usual contacts and links.
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- share this link online, forward it to anyone who might be interested, or better still, publish your own article promoting the newsletter.
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