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Don't forget about our first public meeting for ROAR on the 7th Sept. at 6.30pm. The meeting will be hybrid - Friends Meeting House, Central Manchester, and online (we will share a link).
See our updated list of supporters on this flyer and the original meeting flyer. _______________________________ ROAR (Raising Our Asylum Rights) is developing out of the actions taken by hotel residents whose bravery has brought some of the human rights violations in asylum hotels to national media attention. Beginning with our first public meeting on 7th September, ROAR wants to make information-sharing and organising spaces where people seeking asylum, supported by allies from trades unions and civil society, safely expose human rights violations, participate in constructing alternative solutions, and openly campaign for those solutions (event flyer). 
© Chinnar Najib (artwork for Shay, Aisha and family).
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More about ROAR: Hotels began to be used in the early days of Covid to house people seeking asylum. Since then, ‘contingency hotels’ run by multi-million pound global corporations contracted by the UK government have become a mainstay of the Home Office’s infastructure to ‘deal with’ people coming to the UK seeking asylum. Challenging the violations perpetrated by hotel staff and some external agencies involved in the asylum system — bolstered by the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ over these last three years — anti-racists throughout the UK have activated local, solidarity interventions in response. On top of the inhuman conditions within hotels, ‘residents’ have experienced harrassment, intimidation and attacks outwith hotels. They have become a central focus for racists, operating both inside and outside of Parliament, and for fascists whose purpose is to hold onto, or seize, political power by redirecting attention away from the corporate greed and political corruption that underpins the current ‘cost of living’ crisis. The extreme policies and practices of the UK’s hostile environment — deliberately crafted to demonise, isolate and exclude migrants — relentlessly scapegoat people seeking refuge for many of our current social problems, and are intended to firmly divide, and thereby rule, the wider population into those ‘for’ and those ‘against’ refugee people. Contingency hotels are a key feature of this apparatus. Building on from the work to secure school places for children and Shay’s Family Campaign (Seeking Safety), the ROAR campaign’s first public meeting will foreground people living in hotels as they openly expose the human rights violations of the asylum system under which they have been living, and the wider social and political conditions of the UK’s increasingly racist and fascist hostile environment. We invite all allies to join with them in exploring how, alongside litigation, we can move forward in solidarity together to stop this system. Please share the information and flyer about the meeting, add your group or organisation or union branch to the list of supporters via [email protected], and come along to the meeting yourself. |
ROAR PUBLIC MEETING: 7th Sept. at 6.30pm
ROAR: RAISING OUR ASYLUM RIGHTS
RESISTING RACISM IN HOTELS
PUBLIC MEETING, 6.30PM, 7th SEPTEMBER 2023: FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE, 6 MOUNT STREET, MANCHESTER M2 5NS
Shay Babagar, his wife and their child arrived in the UK seeking asylum as members of the persecuted Balochi people and were placed in a Serco-run hotel in Stockport, Greater Manchester.
The father’s 35-day hunger strike exposed human rights violations in this Serco-run hotel, since which time the family have successfully resisted criminalisation: Greater Manchester police, in the presence of Serco and Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital staff, had immediately arrested this husband and wife upon hospital discharge and then, after keeping them for six hours in separate cells in Pendleton Police Station subsequently charged them. Recently, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against them.
Alongside the family, other speakers will offer examples of actively resisting the racism concentrated in and around asylum hotels, and the meeting will screen film from the family’s arrest, and from another family who were also subjected to deeply disturbing treatment in the same hotel. This is an opportunity for all groups and individuals who want to create effective solidarity to come together and plan for future action.
Please email [email protected] to add your group/ organisation to the growing list of supporters.
Supporters include: Culture Bridge Manchester, GMB Trafford Unity Branch, Greater Manchester SUTR (Stand Up To Racism), IWGB (Independent Workers’ Union Of Great Britain), MIDST (Manchester Immigration Detainee Support Team), MMB (Migration Mobilities Bristol), NUJ Manchester and Salford Branch, Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN), The Peace And Justice Project, RAPAR (Refugee And Asylum Participatory Action Research), Stockport Unite Against Austerity Branch, Unison Northwest Black Members, Unison Greater Manchester Mental Health Branch, Unison Manchester Women’s Self Organised Group, AND Unite Community Greater Manchester.
RESISTING RACISM IN HOTELS
PUBLIC MEETING, 6.30PM, 7th SEPTEMBER 2023: FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE, 6 MOUNT STREET, MANCHESTER M2 5NS
Shay Babagar, his wife and their child arrived in the UK seeking asylum as members of the persecuted Balochi people and were placed in a Serco-run hotel in Stockport, Greater Manchester.
The father’s 35-day hunger strike exposed human rights violations in this Serco-run hotel, since which time the family have successfully resisted criminalisation: Greater Manchester police, in the presence of Serco and Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital staff, had immediately arrested this husband and wife upon hospital discharge and then, after keeping them for six hours in separate cells in Pendleton Police Station subsequently charged them. Recently, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against them.
Alongside the family, other speakers will offer examples of actively resisting the racism concentrated in and around asylum hotels, and the meeting will screen film from the family’s arrest, and from another family who were also subjected to deeply disturbing treatment in the same hotel. This is an opportunity for all groups and individuals who want to create effective solidarity to come together and plan for future action.
Please email [email protected] to add your group/ organisation to the growing list of supporters.
Supporters include: Culture Bridge Manchester, GMB Trafford Unity Branch, Greater Manchester SUTR (Stand Up To Racism), IWGB (Independent Workers’ Union Of Great Britain), MIDST (Manchester Immigration Detainee Support Team), MMB (Migration Mobilities Bristol), NUJ Manchester and Salford Branch, Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN), The Peace And Justice Project, RAPAR (Refugee And Asylum Participatory Action Research), Stockport Unite Against Austerity Branch, Unison Northwest Black Members, Unison Greater Manchester Mental Health Branch, Unison Manchester Women’s Self Organised Group, AND Unite Community Greater Manchester.