The racist riots of recent weeks provided a sombre backdrop for my travel to Geneva, where I presented findings from Amnesty International and the Runnymede Trust to the Committee on Eliminating Racial Discrimination (CERD) at the United Nations. There, we outlined that the UK is not just lagging on its human rights obligations on race, it is categorically failing them — which helps in part to explain why the far-right have been emboldened to wreak havoc on our streets.
While we await further response from the government as to their immediate and long-term plans to tackle systemic and institutionalised racism, the Committee heard the alarming stories and threats of violence that racialised communities across the UK have been experiencing.
We heard from Muslim women in Wales fearing wearing the hijab and the heartbreaking story of Mohammed Idris from Belfast whose cafe was targeted and burnt down in the recent violence.
We may have to wait a few more weeks for the UN’s observations and recommendations to the UK government, but if policymakers are serious about addressing the root causes of racism that plague our society, they cannot delay action. It is in protecting our rights, not diminishing them, that we can progress to an anti-racist society.
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While it is irrefutable that we needed urgent action to tackle the violent racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia that broke out in the last fortnight, the tapestry of discrimination has been woven for far too long, with a clear stagnation of any progress in the last four years on the disparities facing racialised people across the criminal justice system, health, education, employment, and immigration. Racist and Islamophobic violence unfolding on the streets of the UK highlights the failures of successive governments to make progress on racism.
There has been a disturbing ten-year increase in faith-based hate crimes, 47 per cent of children from racialised communities are living in poverty compared to 24 per cent of white children, and police are 6.5 times more likely to strip search Black children, and 4.7 times more likely to strip search Black adults, than their white counterparts.
In this context, some of the measures proposed by the government in response to the violence are in fact concerning. Increasing the use of live facial recognition (LFR) and further policing powers risk human rights violations and may perversely end up discriminating against and not protecting racialised communities in this moment and for years to come.
Disparities facing racialised people have sadly become tightly sewn into the fabric of our society. Failure to improve outcomes whilst attacking the ways in which individuals can dissent leads to an impossible situation.
The Prevent duty, predictive policing and surveillance are undermining all our human rights, such as freedom of expression, association, assembly and crucially the right to non-discrimination. Many of these systems and technologies operate under the narrative of ‘keeping all of us safe’ but violating our rights makes the world more fundamentally unstable.
We need to ensure victims of such systems and programs have access to justice and remedy. Currently, the avenues to seek out information on a Prevent referral are far too arduous, with parents spending thousands of pounds and years of their lives to find out what has happened to their child’s information — and what consequences it may bring for them later in life.
The actions of the government in the aftermath of the far-right violence and rioting should not be viewed in isolation and it will take serious commitment and action to begin to unravel that tapestry and truly protect human rights for all. At a minimum, I hope to see the abolishment of the two-child limit benefit cap and of the Prevent Duty, prohibition in law and in practice of the use of strip searches on children and scrapping of the Serious Violence Reduction Order pilot which enables suspicionless stop and search.
Policy-makers must repeal harmful legislation for people of colour, including a number of parts of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022), Public Order Act (2023), Elections Act (2022) and Section 10 of the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) and we need to explicitly recognise and incorporate the right to housing as a human right in domestic law, policy and practice.
We also need the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including remuneration that allows for a decent living for workers and their families, by addressing income precarity and requiring employers to provide greater employment security for workers by scrapping zero-hours contracts.
Last week, we saw thousands of people come together to counter the far-right, stand up for their communities and extend solidarity to those worst hit. This collective mobilisation must continue, and we must act together to build a movement together that protects our rights, challenges the government to ensure that actions, including those made in our defence, comply with international law and do not risk discriminating against the very communities they were seemingly deployed to protect.
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