Home Office Wants to Know How Well Its Doing at Responding to Your Correspondence
Please do tell them if you get a moment.
https://www.homeofficesurveys.homeoffice.gov.uk/s/108105TAZNG
Gender-Based Killings, Domestic Violence Forms of 'Arbitrary Execution'
A United Nations-appointed human rights expert today said that gender-related killings and domestic murders or intimate partner violence should be understood as forms of arbitrary execution and thus violates the right to life. “Violations of the right to life have usually been understood to be killings involving State officials,” said Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, in her first report to the UN Human Rights Council, according to a news release from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). It is time to recognize that gender-related killings, such as domestic and intimate partner violence, 'honour killings,' or killings of LGBTQI persons, can also amount to arbitrary executions.”
Read more: UN News, http://tiny.cc/a7mply
Inside Trump's Secretive Immigration Court: Far From Scrutiny And Legal Aid
Behind two rows of high fencing and winding coils of razor wire, and surrounded by thick forest in central Louisiana, hundreds of miles from the nearest major city, stands a newly created court the Trump administration hopes will fast-track the removal of undocumented immigrants. Hearings take place in five poky courtrooms behind reinforced grey doors where the public benches, scratched with graffiti, are completely empty. There is no natural light. The hallways are lined with detainees in yellow jumpsuits awaiting their turn before a judge. The five sitting judges were quietly flown in by the US justice department from cities across the United States and will be rotated again within two weeks.
This is the LaSalle detention facility that, since March this year, has been holding removal proceedings for hundreds of detained migrants in courtrooms adjoining a private detention center, which incarcerates more than 1,100 men and women and has the highest number of prisoner deaths of any in America over the past two years. The new setup is part of Donald Trump’s attempts to ramp up deportations by vastly expanding the arrest powers of federal immigration enforcement and prioritising more vulnerable groups of detained migrants in new court locations around the country. It has received little scrutiny since its introduction following a presidential order in January, and the Guardian is the first news organisation to observe proceedings here. Read more: Oliver Laughland Guardian, http://tiny.cc/tonply
Europe’s “Suspended Communities”
The imperative of integrating immigrant communities in Europe into their host nation’s cultures has taken on a new urgency.
The root causes of the accelerating jihadist terror wave across Europe are not economic inequality, racism, or Islamophobia—the usual shibboleths invoked after a terrorist attack. But while radical Islam provides the ideological rationale for jihadist terror, another important enabler is the emergence of an increasingly permanent chain of “suspended communities” nesting within nations throughout the West. As these ethnic and cultural enclaves consolidate, they also grow more and more disconnected from the national community, with daily business transactions often being the dominant form of contact maintained with the larger host nation.
The ethnic and religious diasporas that are to varying degrees the norm across Western Europe today—be they in the suburbs of Paris, the districts of Hamburg, or in towns such as Luton in the United Kingdom. These communities are in essence a petrified version of the once-temporary way stations for migrants, from which the inhabitants eventually ventured forth to become French, German, British, and so on. In contrast, today’s suspended communities freeze the immigration process part way, demanding only a partial uprooting from the original culture and marginal acculturation into the host society. The current immigration pattern into Western Europe, reinforced by decades of misguided multicultural ideology and elite disavowal of the nation-state, lacks a key ingredient of past immigration policies: the finality of acculturation and societal absorption.
Read more: Andrew A. Michta, http://tiny.cc/gf2nly
EU Asylum Reform Deadlocked
The EU will fail to meet a target of the end of June to reform its asylum policies, senior diplomats said as new data showed that Italy could face an unprecedented number of migrants arriving on its shores this year. “Consensus cannot be reached and the European Council will have to see how best to take this forward,” said one senior EU diplomat involved in the talks. There is “no chance” of a deal being struck before the end of the month, another diplomat said.
The EU will fail to meet a target of the end of June to reform its asylum policies, senior diplomats said as new data showed that Italy could face an unprecedented number of migrants arriving on its shores this year. “Consensus cannot be reached and the European Council will have to see how best to take this forward,” said one senior EU diplomat involved in the talks. There is “no chance” of a deal being struck before the end of the month, another diplomat said.
Read more: Jacopo Barigazzi, Politico, http://politi.co/2sRhL7D
Identify Children’s Rights Violators In War
In an open letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 41 organisations working to protect the rights of children in armed conflict have condemned the UN’s reported decision to “freeze” any new additions of armies/groups that commit grave violations of children’s rights to the annexes of the upcoming 2017 annual report to the UN Security Council on children and armed conflict.
There have been past examples of the “politicisation” of the list. In 2015, Israel (over the Gaza war), and, in 2016, Saudi Arabia (over Yemen) avoided being listed after “undue pressure”, the letter said. A freeze would mean the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen would escape again. The rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said: “We believe firmly that the list should be impartial, based on UN-verified evidence, and with all parties held to the same standard.” They also urged Guterres to issue an updated list for 2016.
Read more: IRIN, http://tiny.cc/1x6kly
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Resisting Immigration Raids and the Hostile Environment – Online Guide
Want to know what you can do to resist immigration raids and the government’s hostile environment for migrants? The Anti-Raids Network has produced a simple online guide.
The group encourages people to use their interests or skills with a list of initiatives and ideas to combat raids and the hostile environment. These include:
- Developing a small-scale secure communications infrastructure to share alerts
- Making sure work colleagues know that they can refuse entry to immigration officers, as officers rely heavily on consent alone to raid a property.
- Sending businesses directly at risk of being raided the Network’s know your rights information.
- Creating & sharing images, infographics, posters, or stickers against snitching and collaboration with immigration control, encouraging migrant solidarity, and resistance to immigration raids.
- Using your language skills to do street-based outreach work or helping to translate and proof-read the Network’s ‘Know Your Rights’ cards
- Helping the Network to get leaflets and posters printed.
- Offering your legal skills to aid the Network if you are a lawyer familiar with the powers of immigration officers and the intersections between immigration and public law.
- Running a regular stall, leafleting in the street or going round from shop to shop.
The Anti-Raids Network, a loose grassroots association of individuals, says:
“We don’t just have to wait for ‘racist vans’ to enter our neighbourhoods, we can also follow them when we see them on the move. Have a look at where your nearest enforcement base is and consider organising protests there”.
Source: Migrants Rights Network, http://tiny.cc/pkbnly
MEPs Back Proposal to Fingerprint Asylum Seekers From Age 6
The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Commission has supported a new measure that proposes to lower the fingerprinting age of asylum seekers from 14 to six, according to a report in New Europe. The new measure, which is intended to facilitate children’s reunification with parents, was part of a package of amendments to revamp the Eurodac fingerprint database. In total, the amendments were approved with 35 yes votes, 10 no votes and 8 abstentions.
The MEPs also approved several other measures, including recording unaccompanied minors who disappear from reception facilities in the Schengen Information System (SIS) and reporting them as missing persons, providing European police force Europol with direct access to the Eurodac database to prevent terrorist attacks and common crimes, and allowing the search and comparison of facial images and other personal data in the database, such as name and identity document number when the information becomes available.
Read more: New Europe, 06/06/2017
Donald Trumpski Withdraws from Climate Agreement - Where next for planet Earth?
US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is withdrawing the planet’s second largest polluter from the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change has prompted dismay around the globe. The World Meteorological Organisation is warning that in a worst-case scenario Trump’s move could add 0.3 degrees Celsius to global temperatures by the end of the century. But as IRIN will outline in detail next week, it also compounds the effect on developing countries of ongoing cuts to overseas aid, as the US will cease contributing to the Green Climate Fund – the biggest source of climate finance by far. The private sector has an increasingly vital role to play in climate change mitigation, but the US withdrawal from Paris could relegate American companies to the sidelines in developing countries. The G20 summit in Hamburg on 7/8 July has become a moment of reckoning for world leaders. Can they devise a new business model for climate action and for the involvement of the private sector in this "post-US" era? Source IRIN, http://tiny.cc/fw6kly.
Continuing Conflicts That Create Refugees - May 2017
Deteriorated Situations: Central African Republic, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Thailand, Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Mexico, Egypt, Libya.
Outlook for June - Conflict Risk Alerts: Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Libya.
Resolution Opportunities: None
May saw a new escalation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, while in Libya deadly fighting in the south and in Tripoli dimmed prospects for reconciliation and bodes ill for June. In Egypt, the Islamic State (ISIS) orchestrated another major attack on Christians. Insurgent violence took a high toll on civilians in the Philippines and Afghanistan, and a bombing in Thailand’s deep south injured scores. Attacks on Sri Lanka’s Muslim community were a sign of rising tensions. In Africa, violence involving armed groups surged in the Central African Republic, jihadist attacks rose in Kenya, and former rebels now soldiers mutinied for the second time this year in Côte d’Ivoire. Further fragmentation of criminal organisations in Mexico fuelled violence. In a positive turn, Macedonia finally got a new government, offering a way out of the longstanding political crisis.
Read more: International Crisis Watch, http://tiny.cc/536kly
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