March 2025

March 14, 2025March 14, 2025

LGBTQI+ people in immigration detention

Early Day Motion 809 tabled 24 February 2025: LGBTQI+ people in immigration detention tabled by Bell Ribeiro-Addy

That this House welcomes the ongoing review of the Home Office’s Adults at risk in immigration detention policy; notes that LGBTQI+ people face heightened levels of harassment, discrimination, abuse, and physical and sexual violence in immigration detention; recognises that the bullying of and discrimination against LGBTQI+ people in detention can re-traumatise those who have fled persecution; believes that immigration detention is costly and punitive, and that cheaper and more humane alternatives to detention exist; further welcomes the community-based Alternative to Detention pilots undertaken by the Home Office and supports their wider expansion; calls on the Government to include being gay, lesbian, bisexual or queer in the Adults at risk in immigration detention policies indicators of risk and to remove the categorisation of vulnerability based on evidence levels; and supports the greater use of community-based alternatives to detention.

Please ask your MP to consider supporting this EDM – see the list of signatories here: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/63175

March 8, 2025March 8, 2025

Bridge to Nowhere: UK security strategy in the ruins of Atlantis

6 March 2025: Rethinking Security: Bridge to Nowhere: UK security strategy in the ruins of Atlantis

As Western security alliances fragment, Richard Reeve charts the implications for the UK’s most fundamental strategic assumptions, and makes the case for ‘thinking beyond the unthinkable’ in the government’s next National Security Strategy.

While Ukraine has acutely felt its vulnerability since 2014, only in the last month has the precarity of Europe’s position become startlingly clear. Having already laid claim to Canada, Greenland and Gaza, this past month Trump and Vance have attacked and undermined European democracies, dubbed Volodymyr Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’, and grasped at his country’s mineral wealth while unilaterally seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Moscow’s terms. With Trump burying America’s closest alliances beneath his clear contempt for multilateralism, international law, and liberalism in all its forms, by 23 February Germany’s incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz was pledging “to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA”.

March 5, 2025March 6, 2025

Charities and faith leaders urge reversal of refugee citizenship ban

QARN in good company …

4 March 2025: The Tablet: Charities and faith leaders urge reversal of refugee citizenship ban

Organised by the Refugee Council, the letter to the Home Secretary, Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, received 149 signatories from across the refugee, migrant and children’s sectors, including Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network and Islamic Relief UK.

Nearly 150 charities and faith leaders have challenged new government rules which effectively ban tens of thousands of refugees from ever becoming British citizens. This change affects applications for British citizenship submitted on or after 10 February this year by people who arrived in the UK by irregular routes.

It means that anyone who has entered the UK via a small boat, or by means such as hiding in a vehicle, will normally be refused citizenship, regardless of the time that has passed.

The letter of 16 February highlighted that “over generations, refugees who had to risk their lives because there wasn’t a safe way to reach the UK have become proud British citizens in many professions including as doctors, entrepreneurs and also politicians representing their communities”.