A huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in today's twitter storm highlighting the issues raised in this report, giving those that died a context and an identity, and calling for #SafePassageNow
Special thanks to our report partners @Migrantpptlond1 who helped fund and initiate the report through contact with @legisti based in France, who wrote an earlier French-language version. Please follow both of them to keep in touch with their vital work.
Thanks to @legisti for coordinating the documentation of the many deaths due to border controls and for giving us the results of this report. Special thanks to Maël Galisson.
Merci à @legisti pour le travail de coordination de la documentation des nombreux décès dus aux contrôles aux frontières et pour nous avoir donné les résultats de ce rapport. Merci tout particulièrement à Maël Galisson.
What's the true significance of the EHRC’s recent report on the hostile environment?
IRR Vice-Chair, Frances Webber responds
The report is what's termed a Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) Assessment of the Home Office’s compliance with the Equality Act 2010 – a less rigorous procedure than an inquiry or an investigation into ‘unlawful acts’ defined by the Act, such as discrimination or harassment.
There might have been legal reasons for the EHRC choosing this procedure to look at the legislation which required or enabled others to discriminate (the essence of the hostile environment), as legislation is excluded from the scope of ‘unlawful acts’.
The importance of counting and accounting for deaths at the border was recognised by Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering, who in their 2011 book 'Globalisation and
borders: death at the global frontier' insisted on the importance of first, finding out as much as possible... 1/3
about the lives of those who died seeking safety, security, family or a better life, to re-humanise the people behind the statistics; and second, showing that the deaths are not ‘natural’ or ‘tragic accidents’ but man-made... 2/3
The IRR is concerned that the government has given a contract to develop a ‘border flow tool’ to a company with disturbing links to the US far Right and which does not respect privacy or data protection safeguards.
The new border contract gives US data analytics firm Palantir Technology access to HMRC and Home Office data in addition to data on goods and transport.
Founded by right-wing billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, the ‘patriotic’ company has been sued in the US for discriminating against Asian applicants and hires relatively few immigrants, citing a ‘reduced threat of subversion from workers or a foreign power’
As criticisms grow of Trevor Phillips involvement in the government’s inquiry into the disproportionate impact of #Covid19 on BAME communities, @PHE_uk has said that a consultancy run by Phillips and Prof Richard Webber have the right skills and experience to aid the inquiry 1/14
This thread is aimed at testing this claim through the lens of Webber and Phillips' previous work in creating ‘coding’ systems marketed to police forces. 2/14
The research consultancy Webber Phillips is the UK distributor of ‘Origins’, a postcode-based classification system which allows the police to infer the cultural background of people involved in incidents by examining their names. 3/14