We support the measures, but systemic problems must also be addressed

Letter from HRS to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on street riots across the UK.  Dear Prime Minister and Home Secretary,

We, the Human Rights Solidarity, a registered charity in England and Wales, commend your efforts to control the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots. As a human rights organization working mainly with immigrants of Muslim background, we wholeheartedly support the decision of the Home Secretary to strengthen the protection for Muslim communities across the UK. These measures will certainly ease the tensions, but there are systemic issues that need to be addressed urgently.

The far-right sentiments against the immigrants are byproducts of the decade-old Hostile Environment Policy of the previous governments. These policies created a pejorative vocabulary about immigrants, led to a culture of defamatory news coverage when it came to the immigrant communities, and paved the way to the current toxicity of disinformation in social media.

The fact that the austerity regime left behind vulnerable communities is well-understood and addressed by your government. But the equally important and even more destructive hostile environment policies are yet to be addressed in full.

We hereby invite the Home Secretary to publicly declare the end of the hostile environment and establish mechanisms to cleanse the vestiges of that policy in the civil service.

We invite your government to replace the existing immigration detention centres which proved too costly to run and secure, and too inhuman to experience, even before the riots, with modern compounds where detention is not meant to act as a deterrent.

We invite the Home Secretary to review the existing policy of not letting the asylum seekers work and adopt the German model where the asylum seekers will be able to work as soon as they find a job and attain a certain level of language fluency. This will ease the economic burden of the asylum mechanism on the public purse.

We invite the Home Secretary to review the current policy of starting the five-year residence requirement before applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain from the day the refugee statuses of the asylum seekers are recognized by the Home Office. That period starts, all over Europe, from the day the asylum application is made and both the social fabric and the economic system benefit from the elimination of uncertainty from the lives of the refugees as early as possible.

Former Labour Party governments have been architects of devolution and human rights regulations. With more control in the Parliament, and with more urgency at the societal level, we are expecting the current Labour Government to continue the good work of the previous Labour eras.

Sincerely Yours,

Mehmet Ozdemir

President of the Board of Trustees

Human Rights Solidarity