2019/1 QARN Minute: We agree to support the work of the campaign End Deportations- Stop Charter Flights, and ask Sheila to write to them expressing our support, and to put a link on our website. On our own website we will also highlight the moral injustice of using terrorism legislation against peaceful protest. QARN has taken on Removals/Deportations as a specific concern.
QARN Meeting of 19 January 2019
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Updated 24.2.2019: Stansted 15 ordered back to court over aggravated trespass case
Activists’ lawyer says notice has caused the group ‘great anxiety and distress’. This was then withdrawn.
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I’m Proud To Be One Of The Stansted 15 – This Is Our Story
Sooner or later, our struggle related to this trial will be over – but the wider struggle against the hostile environment must continue …
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Please sign and share! https://www.change.org/p/home-office-end-the-hostile-environment-and-deportation-charter-flights-justice-for-the-stansted-15
‘My name is Angela MacKeith. This is me and my daughter May. She is one of fifteen human rights activists who have just been convicted of a terror offence for taking peaceful action to stop a deportation charter flight. She and her friends face a prison sentence.’
‘We call on the UK government to end its inhumane hostile environment policies and to end its barely legal and shameful practice of deportation charter flights. We also call for the Stansted 15 to be spared prison. They did not aim to inconvenience people, and this arduous trial has had such a profound impact on the defendants’ lives that they are unlikely to take such action again.
The Stansted 15 are a credit to human rights. They and their intentions should be supported, not punished.’
Campaign
Every 49 minutes, someone is taken from their life in the UK to another country, by force. Not by a rogue kidnapper, but by outsourcing companies acting on behalf of the UK government.
Of the 10,706 people removed by force in 2016, one in 7 were by mass deportation – where people of the same nationality are rounded up and shipped out of the UK on a secret, night-time charter flight hired out exclusively for that purpose.
End Deportations platforms acts of resistance to mass deportations. It houses resources for anyone wanting to take action against deportations or mass deportations.
The #StopCharterFlights campaign aims to make mass deportations by charter flight unworkable and publicly unacceptable. Ending mass deportations is achievable and would be a small but significant step in building a society that doesn’t deport people on the basis of their race or nationality.
Why?
Deportations tear lives apart. They break up families and leave holes in communities. Often people are deported to countries where they have no home, family, friends or job.
Deportations are dangerous. Violence is often used on the flight, sometimes fatally. Mass deportations by charter flight have no other passengers, so there are no witnesses to the violence. People who came to the UK for safety may face persecution or death if returned.
Deportations are racist. They target migrants only, and disproportionately target people of colour. Mass deportations by charter flight are doubly racist, since they target people on the basis of their perceived nationality in order to fill the seats of a plane.
Deportations are expensive. It costs the UK £96 per day to detain an individual before deporting them, which is around three times more than the cost per day of housing them. On top of this, mass deportations cost more than £5,200 per person deported.
They have to stop. #StopCharterFlights