Latest news with #anti-Iraq
Telegraph
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Asylum seeker allowed to stay in Britain after judge confused Iraq with Iran
An Iraqi asylum seeker was allowed to stay in Britain after an immigration judge confused his home country with Iran. The unnamed man won his case after Judge Helena Suffield-Thompson delivered a ruling based on guidance that related to the wrong Middle Eastern state. She assessed that he would be at risk of persecution because of anti-Iraq government posts on his public Facebook account that would be subject to surveillance. However, Judge Suffield-Thompson had based the ruling on Iran, which has a 'sophisticated' capability to monitor the social media accounts of political opponents, rather than Iraq, which carries out no such surveillance. A new tribunal has since found that Judge Suffield-Thompson 'erred in law' as the apparent 'risks' to the asylum seeker were based on an assessment of Iran instead of Iraq – which carries out no such surveillance. New tribunal hearing The asylum case will now have to start again with a new tribunal hearing it due to the blunder. The case, disclosed in court papers, is the latest example exposed by the Telegraph where migrants or convicted foreign criminals have won the right to remain in the UK or halt their deportations. There are a record 41,987 outstanding immigration appeals, largely on human rights grounds, which threaten to hamper Labour's efforts to fast-track removal of illegal migrants. The backlog has risen by nearly a quarter since September and is up nearly 500 per cent from just 7,173 at the start of 2022. In an initial asylum appeal in July 2022, Judge Suffield-Thompson ruled in the unnamed Iraqi's favour after he argued 'he was at risk from the Kurdish leadership as he had exposed their corrupt practices and behaviour'. The asylum seeker claimed 'he campaigned against the Kurdish leadership in the UK' and was involved in 'activities' in Britain and 'expressed his views on Facebook such that he would be at risk of persecution on return as a result.' Judge had 'materially erred' But following the July 2022 decision to allow him to stay, the Home Office launched an appeal, asserting the judge 'had materially erred by relying on the factual findings of Country Guidance decisions that did not relate to the country situation in Iraq and instead either related to Turkey or Iran'. It added: 'It is contended therefore that the appeal has been allowed on an erroneous basis.' Judge Suffield-Thompson in July 2022 had claimed, wrongly, that the Iraqi authorities had developed 'sophisticated' means to keep check on the activities of demonstrators, Facebook users and bloggers abroad. 'The [Iraqi's] Facebook posts are public so he will be readily identified as the person making those anti-government posts. He will also have to disclose that he has been living in the UK. He is not expected to lie about his political views and beliefs due to fear of persecution,' the tribunal was told. However, the upper immigration tribunal found there was no evidence that Iraqi authorities monitor the social media pages of anti-Iraq protestors, unlike Iran. Judge Lucy Murray said: 'It is unclear whether [Judge Suffield-Thompson] mistakenly thought that [Iranian case law] was in fact Iraqi country guidance case law. The case reference is incorrectly cited by her ... and omits the word 'Iran'. 'In the circumstances, I conclude that [Judge Suffield-Thompson's] assessment of the risk on return to the [Iraqi] due to his sur place activities was based on country guidance that did not relate to Iraq.'
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Resistance review – a captivating century of protest and photography
Taking us from the founding of the suffragette movement in 1903 to the vast demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003, Resistance presents us with a century of protest in Britain, of causes and gatherings and acts of defiance. A hundred years of reasons, of inequalities and wrongs and rights, of marches and riots, of peaceful sit-downs and kiss-ins, of fortitude and dissent and things kicking off. Things can get ugly. A fire bomb in the road, marbles under the horses' hooves. Not resisting is uglier. Resistance also presents us with 100 years of photographs. Filled with incident and detail, personal shots and anonymous press images, documentary series and photographs found in archives and culled from collections, they range from journalistic assignments to surreptitious surveillance images, pictures by famous photographers and by anonymous agency ones. Conceived by Steve McQueen and curated by Clarrie Wallis, it is a show of fractured continuities and swerving vantage points. All the images have been scanned in black and white and hung in black frames. There are a few sepia-toned photos but no colour images. All the prints are relatively small and invite close looking. They gather and disperse and they march around the walls of the Turner Contemporary. The images home in and they pull back. We see crowds on the move and groups of the unemployed lying in the road to disrupt the traffic on Oxford Street. Protesters occupy tree houses high above the proposed Newbury bypass and they dance on the missile silos at Greenham Common. We find ourselves in courtrooms and cells, marching among millions and watching Arthur Scargill on the telly in someone's sitting room in the north-east of England. There's disenfranchised lassitude and the amazing creativity of the squatters who occupied scaffolding towers and netting above a row of houses to prevent their eviction. A couple dance wildly at an early Caribbean carnival in St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, sound systems are rigged-up in Notting Hill and anti-Iraq war activist Brian Haw begins his 670th day of protest opposite the Houses of Parliament in 2003 (his vigil lasted a decade, until his death in 2011). There are riots in the Bogside; Tom Robinson performing at a Rock Against Racism carnival; anti-racists blocking a National Front demonstration in New Cross; and Humphrey Spender documenting the Great Depression in 1936, photographing kids playing in a derelict street in Jarrow and unemployed Tyneside workers on the Newcastle quay, the Tyne Bridge looming behind them. Images such as Spender's, published in the popular Picture Post, gained enormous currency. Subtitled How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, the exhibition ends at a point when social media and advances in smartphone technology began to irrevocably change our relationship with images, as well as the relationship between photographs and videos and truth. The exhibition is compelling in all sorts of ways. As social history, as documentary, as eye-witness report and as remembering, whether it is of the unemployment marches of the 1930s or the protests against the overwhelming silence surrounding the deaths of 13 young people in a house fire in New Cross in 1981. Resistance is more than a parade of markers or a timeline of dissent. Well-known protests such as the Grunwick Dispute in 1976-8, in which a group of mostly Indian female workers from east Africa walked out of the film processing factory in west London where they suffered low wages, intimidation and exploitation, or the demonstration against the poll tax in 1990, the battles for gay liberation and against Section 28, also meet largely forgotten protests here; members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds protest 'against the use of egret feathers in hats' at a demonstration in London in 1911, and blind people march from cities around England and Wales to London in 1920, petitioning for 'Justice not Charity'. In the early 1990s, disabled protesters hold a 'Piss on Pity' campaign challenging ITV's patronising, celebrity telethon appeals, and 30 years on we have 'crip rights' and protests. It is easy to get caught up in the incidental details. The policeman wheeling his bike behind the Jarrow marchers. The kid, knock-kneed, hands in the pockets of his shorts, staring at the photographer Christine Spengler while she's taking a picture of a young British soldier on a Belfast corner in 1970. I do a double-take. The kid's wearing a weirdly comical mask, his own resistance to the presence of soldiers on the streets. The young unemployed sit on the floor and lean at the counter in the dole office, in Tish Murtha's 1981 series Youth Unemployment. From the same series, kids leap from a high window on to a pile of old mattresses in a wretched, partly demolished housing block. An onlooker in the image is holding a ventriloquist's dummy, which looks back out at us, a sort of bug-eyed rejoinder to our looking. John Deakin, then working for Picture Post, took a group of portraits of delegates at the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester. These included Jomo Kenyatta, future president of Kenya, and Jamaican Pan-African activist Amy Garvey. The photographer's close friend Francis Bacon called Deakin the greatest portrait photographer since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron. We meet individuals as well as crowds here; Tony Benn, speaking in Trafalgar Square during the Suez crisis, and Bertrand Russell, at an anti-nuclear missile protest in 1961 ('Bertrand Russell – King of the kids!', my father used to shout, whenever the aged philosopher appeared on the television). Oswald Mosley, in ridiculous jodhpurs and riding boots, exchanges a fascist salute with his blackshirt followers at a 1936 rally, and here's Mosley again, rallying a postwar crowd. He's ditched his absurd uniform of strongman leather belt and the boots by now. Mosley's pre-war antisemitism gave way, by the 1970s, to the National Front and broader attacks on immigration and the Black and Asian population, leading to mass demonstrations and shows of revulsion against them. Sometimes resistance has to go on and on and it must never stop. An anti-fascist protester is led away after a mounted police baton charge during the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and a week later fire runs in the gutter on another East End street. There are flashpoints and long-terms protest, hunger strikes and a picture of a 'dirty protester' incarcerated in Belfast's Maze Prison, smuggled out in 1979. We find covert police images of suffragettes, and another of them in court (the camera hidden in the photographer's hat). The stories bolster the images and keep the whole thing alive. The exhibition and accompanying book – with numerous essays by Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy, Baroness Chakrabarti and others, and including first-hand accounts of protest movements and acts of resistance – has been several years in the making. McQueen's highly personal introduction recounts his going to a Saturday school, one of several set up by Black families to help children who were being failed by the education system. It was here that McQueen learned to draw, and to gain confidence. Eventually he went to art school. The first demonstration he went on was against the introduction of student tuition fees in 1988. He knows he could not have gone to art school if he'd had to pay. 'My own resistance started with me loving myself,' he writes. 'My resistance was my courage to dare and push my ability.' Resistance is inspiring. Resistance is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 22 February to 1 June
