We have not brought you a RAPAR update for a little while now, but we continue to be very busy doing what RAPAR does best: challenging the State and the State’s institutions on human rights violations and humanity-denying actions, and campaigning for human rights for all.
 
The #StatusNow4All campaign and the Status Now Network (SNN) initiated by RAPAR continues to grow and the call for Status Now for everyone has been signed by over 125 organisations and counting, and the online petition is nearing 5000 signatures from individuals. Check the SNN website for more detail and follow us on twitter and facebook.
 
Inside of RAPAR, our mental health, housing, women’s, and men’s campaigning groups are meeting frequently and instigating their own awareness-raising and change-making campaigns as we speak. RAPAR’s research now includes two European Union funded, Erasmus+ youth projects, the just finished Big Lottery funded Building Resilience project (see below), and ongoing research with the women’s group.

Cats on the Run
 
This week saw the much-anticipated launch of RAPAR’s Cats on the Run, a project that aimed to highlight the struggle that displaced, undocumented people face during the pandemic. The idea was conceived by RAPAR and created by Sheba Arts, a women-led arts collective in Manchester, and funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation.
 
After numerous accounts of the atrocities that displaced people face upon their migration, particularly at the hands of human traffickers, it tells of the destitution, street homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, and other deplorable situations that displaced people find themselves in once they arrive in the UK. One participant, who had been street homeless throughout the winter, tells of the difficulties he had accessing healthcare at a hospital because he had no ID card or legal status in the UK. Another participant asks the poignant question: “If this pandemic has been hard for those with access to everything, imagine how hard it has been for me”.
 
Cats on the Run launched on Wednesday the 9th of June with attendees from multiple charities and locations, and several speeches. RAPAR’s own Rhetta Moran gave a speech in which she celebrated the ‘terrible beauty’ of what had been created, criticising the situation which makes it easy for RAPAR to find 22 people (including two babies) in destitution in the UK. She said:
 
When I thought about talking today about this project Cats on the Run, a phrase kept on coming into my mind. It’s an ambiguous phrase that was composed by the poet WB Yeats when he wrote the poem ‘Easter 1916’, about the revolutionary uprising against British imperialism that began in Dublin on the Easter Sunday of 1916. The refrain of his poem is “a terrible beauty is born.” “A terrible beauty is born.”
 
This film that we have all just watched – what I see is terrible beauty. Terrible, because no one, not in Manchester, not in the UK, not anywhere in the world, should be experiencing what the two men in our film have just revealed to us. (Rhetta Moran) 
 
Rhetta also noted the collective spirit that had arisen to produce this powerful piece of documentary, and closed with a profound quote from Shade Alonge that highlighted the quite unnoticed fact that the people who donated so much of their time, effort and resources to those left behind by the pandemic are now themselves facing destitution.  
 
When COVID first began, the people who came forward to feed and shelter undocumented women and their children, now some of them are running out of food and money for themselves, as well as for the people who they are helping. It is becoming very desperate and evicting people onto the street does nothing, apart from create more illnesses, more miseries and more risks of death. It has to stop. (Shade Alonge)
 
These people should not go unnoticed or unhelped.

Building networks of resilience
 
This week also saw the publication of the Building Resilience project report, written by Grainne McMahon, Rhetta Moran and Sunitha Dwarakanath (McMahon et al, 2021). The work, a collaboration between RAPAR, Migrant Voice and Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, aimed to understand, quantitatively and qualitatively, the effect of Covid 19 and lockdowns on marginalised communities in the UK. The report, which was recently referenced on iNews and Sky News, sets out the learnings from a survey and interviews, and an evaluation of building community networks of resilience, to explore and understand how resilience is released and developed, and inhibited because of the UK’s hostile environment, within the communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.
 
Both of these projects illustrate that RAPAR continues to be at the forefront of insightful, practical research as well as explorative, creative campaigns around human rights, and we are extremely grateful that we participate in such a strong and passionate community of like-minded organisations and individuals.

• Join us outside the Asylum & immigration Tribunal Office in Manchester on 19th September.
• No-one is Safe Until Everyone Is Safe. End intimidation of refugees. 
• Please wear masks and stay physically distanced. 
• ​#HealthandSafetyforAll  #StatusNow4All  

Join RAPAR members and StatusNow4All signatories In a peaceful demonstration outside the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal Office in Manchester on Saturday, 19th September, between 1pm and 2.30pm.
 
This will be part of a national day of action in solidarity with 'Status Now' signatory Regularise which campaigns  for the rights of undocumented migrants.

Regularise is holding a protest outside 10 Downing Street in London on the same day and at the same time as the Manchester demonstration.
 
The protest in Manchester will focus on the re-opening of Immigration Reporting Centres in the UK and Britain First's harassment of refugees who have been placed in hotels. It will be held at the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal Office on Saturday 19th September, 1pm-2.30pm, Piccadilly Exchange, 2 Piccadilly Plaza, Mosley Street, Manchester M1 4AH. 

Interrogating and challenging the UK's 'hostile environment' through research and activism
 
About the events
 
These ESRC Festival of Social Sciences events - co-delivered by the Centre for Citizenship, Conflict, Identity and Diversity, University of Huddersfield, and RAPAR, a human rights organisation based in Manchester - will comprise a co-delivered seminar and workshop to interrogate and challenge the ‘hostile environment’ that targets people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. They will draw upon co-research between the University of Huddersfield and RAPAR's young people seeking asylum that took place as part of the PARTISPACE project funded by H2020 (2016-2018) and explored young people’s participation in the hostile environment, as well as ongoing research on activism, campaigning and young people’s lives. They will consider transcultural ideas of space, place and borders, who ‘belongs’ and ‘others’, and explore what and how discourses of othering, central to the ‘hostile environment’, enforce and reinforce exclusion and difference in individuals’ everyday lived lives, and how people counteract these discourses through their own actions.
 
Welcoming academics, practitioners, the public, activists and advocates, the events will begin informally with refreshments and a screening of ‘Faceless’, a film written, produced, directed and performed by young people (aged 25-30) seeking asylum. A seminar talk describing ongoing participatory action research by and with young people seeking asylum will follow. Co-delivered by academics and community activists, the concluding workshop will explore participatory action research in the academy and community human rights activism to explore the question: How do the concepts of space, place and the ‘other’ materialise and what can we do, between us, to transform them?
 
The event will run twice: in Huddersfield (4th November 2019) and Manchester (7th November 2019), both 13.30 to 17.00.

Click here for more details.