Latest news with #ethnicMinorities
South China Morning Post
05-07-2025
- Sport
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong enterprise's mission to help ethnic minority groups through sport
A Hong Kong social enterprise is on a mission to help the city's ethnic minority groups build a career in sports, while also offering culturally and religiously sensitive programmes. Inherited Sports supports ethnic minority communities by helping them qualify as coaches, opening up job opportunities and broadening career prospects. The group has helped 11 men and two women become certified coaches, and later this month will launch its annual programme to teach Muslim women to swim. 'Inherited Sports is all about helping ethnic minorities in Hong Kong,' project officer and coach Tushal Gaha said. 'Many may not know Chinese, and what happens if you don't know Chinese? Maybe you get fewer job opportunities. Inherited Sports lead project officer Gaha Tushal. Photo: Jonathan Wong 'We're trying to find ways to break the cycle of ethnic minorities working for Foodpanda, in construction, being security guards and things like that.'
The Independent
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
More than 100 officers were hurt in Northern Ireland riots
More than 100 police officers were injured during recent rioting in Northern Ireland, PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher has revealed. Mr Boutcher said the actions of his officers had saved lives during the first night of racist violence in Ballymena last month. However, he warned that a budget crisis facing the force means that its reliance on external support is apparent. Violence erupted in Ballymena in June after an alleged sexual assault of a girl in the town. Two 14-year-old boys, who spoke to a court through a Romanian interpreter, were charged with attempted rape. A peaceful protest in the Co Antrim town about the alleged assault was followed by attacks on police and properties housing ethnic minorities, described by police as 'racist thuggery'. The disturbances lasted for several nights and spread to other areas of Northern Ireland including Portadown, Larne, Belfast, Carrickfergus, Londonderry and Coleraine. Police also dealt with several nights of sectarian disorder in Londonderry. Speaking during the monthly accountability meeting of the Policing Board, Mr Boutcher said Northern Ireland had experienced 'widespread racially and sectarian motivated rioting and disorder' in the past month. He said: 'In disgraceful scenes reminiscent of last summer, we saw hate-filled mobs throw petrol bombs, masonry, fireworks, an axe, at police officers, targeting homes and businesses. 'They targeted law-abiding, decent families from diverse communities who make Northern Ireland a better place, creating fear in people who simply want to live in peace. 'I can confirm the final number of injured officers as 107, many with head injuries from masonry and other missiles.' He added: 'There is no place for such violence, these actions were not about protest, they were attacks on the very fabric of our society. 'What sort of Northern Ireland do we want to live in?' The Chief Constable said every incident during the disturbances was being treated as a racially or sectarian motivated hate crime. He said: 'To date 56 arrests have been made and 27 individuals remanded into custody. 'More will follow as we pursue those responsible and bring them to justice. 'The deterrents of long prison sentences will be a sobering reality for many of those involved. 'Our own no-nonsense approach of arresting suspects with the swift release of suspect images had a further powerful deterrent effect.' 'We will use the most appropriate tactics, including AEP (attenuating energy projectiles) and water cannon to protect communities and my officers from harm. 'Our approach will be robust and it will be consistently applied.' Mr Boutcher referred to commentary suggesting rioters were treated differently in separate parts of Northern Ireland. He said: 'I want to be absolutely clear, we respond to public disorder without fear or favour. 'There is no difference to our approach based on the background or motivation of those involved. 'To suggest otherwise removes the focus of condemnation where it rightfully belongs, upon those using violence and spreading hate. 'It is crucial we are collectively seen to be unequivocal in standing together against these cowardly acts of racism, hatred and violence.' The Chief Constable continued: 'On that first night of disorder in Ballymena… officers of the PSNI saved people's lives and they put their own lives at risk to do that. 'We did not have enough officers there because we are not sufficiently resourced and that has got to change.' Mr Boutcher referred to mutual aid arrangements which led to officers from Police Scotland being sent to Northern Ireland during the rioting. He said: 'That mutual aid was required and again highlights the unacceptable fragility of our own resourcing. 'Our reliance on external support has never been more apparent.'
Reuters
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
China appoints ethnic affairs head as Xinjiang Communist Party chief
BEIJING, July 1 (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party has appointed the head of an ethnic affairs panel as its new party secretary in the vast northwestern region of Xinjiang, the official news agency Xinhua said on Tuesday. Chen Xiaojiang has also held a vice ministerial role since 2020 in the party's United Front Work Department, his profile on China's Wikipedia equivalent, Baidu's Baike, shows. The department runs influence operations related to ethnic minorities, religious groups and on the Taiwan issue at home and abroad. In 2020, he also became the first individual with an ethnic Han majority background to be appointed director of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission since it was re-established in 1978, the Caixin business outlet said. Xinhua did not say when Chen will officially take up the role. In 2022, the United Nations reported finding "serious human rights violations" against mainly Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang under China's national security and counter-terrorism policies, as well as forced labour accusations. China has repeatedly countered that the rights of all ethnic groups in the region were protected, while denying forced labour. It has dismissed the report as "groundless" and a part of the West's attempts to contain China.
Telegraph
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Lord Hermer's denial of two-tier justice is a disgrace
This week, Lord Hermer was asked by the BBC about two-tier justice, the idea that the British state treats ethnic minorities more favourably than the white working class. This perception, so corrosive to faith in the rule of law, has become widespread since the crackdown on the Southport unrest last summer. Never one to read the public or political mood, Starmer's lawyer ally simply issued a blunt and contemptuous denial. Such claims are 'frankly disgusting', he said, and indeed 'offensive' to police, prosecutors and courts. He added that instead of criticising the British justice system, politicians 'need to get behind it, not seek to undermine it'. (Perhaps he should have a word with the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who earlier this year had to intervene to block sentencing guidelines which she herself labelled 'two-tier'.) It's a woefully tone-deaf performance, suggesting that Hermer doesn't even understand why the Government's response to the Southport unrest gave rise to charges of unfairness. He argued that people were wrong to compare the policing of London Gaza marches, often awash with anti-Semitism but 'not producing violence', with the Southport unrest, since this saw attacks against police officers. No one would say violent rioters shouldn't be treated robustly. But what Hermer ignores is the way the state dealt fiercely with white, working-class Southport rioters in a way it never does with more favoured groups. Just weeks before, when rioters in ultra-diverse Harehills, Leeds, overturned a police car and set a bus on fire, the police reportedly ran away. Meanwhile, days into the Southport unrest, when armed Muslim mobs formed supposedly in order to protect their local communities, the police let them have free rein. In Birmingham on August 5, the result was a pub being attacked, with a man outside it suffering a lacerated liver, amid other disorder. Even more than this double-standard though, it is the punitive crackdown on online speech that has caused there were many who found themselves charged and remanded in custody for social media posts, the most high-profile is Lucy Connolly, imprisoned for 31 months for a single nasty tweet (which she later deleted) on the night of the Southport murders. As the Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, Lord Hermer personally approved the prosecution of Mrs Connolly for stirring up racial hatred, despite having the constitutional power not to. Hermer has also declined to seek to review lenient sentences for gang grooming offenders – but in his political judgement, it was in the public interest for Connolly to face up to seven years in prison over one nasty tweet. Former Attorney General Suella Braverman says she would not have consented to the charge. 'We don't have a two-tiered justice system', insists Hermer. We have an 'independent justice system'. But can anyone really look at the state response to Southport and claim it 'independent' from politics? Sir Keir Starmer politicised the justice system the moment he claimed all of those involved were 'far-Right thugs', who had come from out of town to cause chaos. In reality, subsequent analysis of the arrest data along with a recent report by the police inspectorate have poured cold water on those claims. Politicians were also swiftly claiming that online speech was a principal cause, with Hermer himself crowing that 'you cannot hide behind your keyboard'. This narrative was no less dubious – no one needed to be told by social media to be angry about the horrific murders of three children. Yet both became reasons for the police, the CPS and the courts to throw the book at people like Connolly over tweets. '[T]heir intention was always to hammer me', as Lucy told the Telegraph earlier this year. Lucy's two-tier treatment continues to this day. First, she was denied release on temporary license to care for her daughter and sick husband. This is a privilege which even murderers are sometimes granted, and which has been granted to others at Lucy's prison. Now she says she's being cruelly mistreated in prison. Does Hermer seriously think it's 'disgusting' to see this as unfair? Hermer can deny two-tier justice all he likes, but the more the public hears about cases like Connolly, the more the charge rings true. A recent YouGov poll found public confidence in the judicial system at an all-time low, with the proportion expressing 'no confidence at all' rising four per cent since last June. Berating people who feel these concerns will not make them go away.
Reuters
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
BELFAST, June 18 (Reuters) - Bullets and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few". "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around 6% of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16%. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win."
