Germany's Stephen Lawrence

Campaigners in Germany, protesting at the suspicious death in custody of Oury Jalloh in 2005 and the subsequent cover-up by the criminal justice system, are looking to the Lawrence trial, the Macpherson Report and other British institutional responses to see how Germany could learn from the British experience

German policing at the intersection: race, gender, migrant status and mental health

Germany not only avoids using the term ‘race’, but its institutions, such as the police, refrain from collecting statistics according to race, gender, ethnicity and so on, which makes it hard to prove that police actions, and particularly violence, differentially affect non-white Germans. Examining a series of controversial cases in which non-white Germans have been killed in encounters with the police, the author argues for an understanding of how race and other identities intersect, and shows how the police mount a dubious ‘cultural defence’ – based on their perceived fears – to justify their disproportionate use of force. Deaths in custody provide a lens through which to view the need in Germany to identify and accept the presence of patterns of institutional racism

A body does not just combust: racism and the law in Germany

This is a short commentary article on the experience of being a trial observer in German court case. The piece examines some of the challenges in identifying and discussing racism in investigating deaths in police custody in the German context

Death zones, comfort zones: queering the refugee question

Sexuality-based refugee claims constitute an expanding area of legal practice and scholarship. This expansion in the field of refugee law mirrors international efforts to address homophobia in various sites around the globe, and in legal terms, this has predominantly taken the form of rights-based protections, such as decriminalising same-sex sexual acts as a matter of civil and political rights. The strategies of addressing sex-, gender- and sexuality-based oppression in the context of free movement on one hand and constitutional protections on the other share a common set of tensions and dilemmas, and both risk re-inscribing fundamental aspects of the very violence that they each seek to address. This article asks what it might mean to ‘queer’ refugee law, particularly in the context of its dynamic relationship with the discourse of decriminalisation. The article takes forward the centrality of sexual politics within the moral economy of migration regulation and attempts to approach it with the methodological impulse and transformative potential that ‘queer’ suggests

The United Kingdom on Race

The United Kingdom’s Commission on Ethnic and Racial Disparities, led by Tony Sewell, has recently published a report (“the Sewell Report”), which has been widely discredited since its launch by charities, education unions, academics and politicians. The report contends that institutional racism is an overused concept (p. 27), that slavery should be reimagined to have served the positive ends of berthing a culturally “remodelled African/Brit[ish]” subject (p. 8), that racialised minority groups should no longer assume that they may be disadvantaged owing to racism and should “help themselves” through empowerment in what it describes as an “era of participation” (p. 7). This is all premised on the idea that the UK is essentially a fair society in which opportunities are generally open to its citizens, with few exceptions. The report contends that the UK can serve as a beacon on racial equality for Europe and the rest of the world (p. 8)

Burden sharing in refugee law

This chapter outlines out some of the ways in which the concept of ‘burden sharing’ has been considered within international refugee law. As it would be misleading to insist on too rigid a genealogy of the term ‘burden sharing’, given the far-reaching potential for application of such a concept within international refugee law theory and practice, the first section identifies the defining ways in which the concept is used. The second section critically interrogates the logics that underlie the commonplace notion of ‘the burden’ of burden sharing and postulates a different framework of understanding the concept. The chapter ultimately argues that, if the ‘burden’ represents a cost, then it is more aptly described as the cost of bordering logics, rather than the cost of accommodating refugee migration, and that the social, historical, political and moral dimensions of this cost should be urgently evaluated

Refugee law in crisis: decolonizing the architecture of violence

Book synopsis: In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen chapters that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Neatly organized in four parts, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging is excavated throughout the chapters presented in the book, thereby transforming the way we think about migration

Mental health and death in custody: The Angiolini Review

The author discusses the findings and recommendations of the first official review of practices and processes relating to and following police-related deaths in the UK. Dame Elish Angiolini’s 2017 report paid particular notice to mental health implications and the impact on families who had lost loved ones. Excerpts are provided here of remarks by Deborah Coles (of INQUEST) and Marcia Rigg (of the United Families and Friends Campaign) at the report’s launch – focusing on the call for automatic legal aid for families at inquests and the end to police conferring after an incident. Though not an abolitionist text, the author points to certain recommendations which could lead to less and less dangerous policing of vulnerable communities