Bridges Not Borders: Building a world where nobody is illegal
When: June 9, 2016
6pm Thursday 9 June
SOAS, Vernon Square, Penton Rise, London, WC1X 9EW
Join Global Justice Now and others as we discuss how a more just world depends on bringing down borders.
Speakers:
Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations.
Barbara Ntumy, student campaigner.
Dr Paolo Novak, convenes SOAS’s Masters course in migration, mobility and development.
Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary (speaker tbc).
Alex Scrivener, policy officer at Global Justice Now
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Thousands of people every year die attempting to cross the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. According to the International Organisation for Migration, over 25,000 migrants have died in their attempt to reach or stay in Europe since 2000.
But this is not a migrant crisis. This is a crisis caused by war, poverty and inequality. Rich countries, with the help of the highly profitable security industry, have tried their best to use cruel migration controls, fences, walls and even guns to force people to accept lives of violence and destitution.
Freedom of movement can help us defeat poverty and inequality. It can help us to develop knowledge, skills and understanding, as well as generate large flows of remittances from the global north and to the global south. We need to argue for a better system. We must work towards free movement for everyone.
This is a public event aimed at encouraging discussion around migration, free movment and working towards a fairer world for those involved and interested in this movement. We actively encourage participation of people from organisations, campaigning groups and communities working for migrant rights, and of course, those from affected communties.
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Speakers background:
Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations.
She has worked at IRR for 29 years. She writes and speaks extensively on aspects of contemporary racism, refugee rights, far-right extremism and Islamophobia across Europe and is author of A suitable enemy: racism, migration and Islamophobia in Europe and They Are Children Too: a study of Europe’s deportation policies. Liz was part of the CARF Collective, and an expert witness at the Basso Permanent People’s Tribunal on asylum and the World Tribunal on Iraq. She is currently an associate of the International State Crime Initiative at King’s College London. Her most recent project, Alternative Voices on Integration in Europe, foregrounded the work of youth groups and innovative anti-racist projects whose initiatives are largely ignored by the mainstream.
Barbara Ntumy, student campaigner.
Barbara is a student campaigner & immigrant who fights against racial injustice. She is a keen activist as part of Stand Up To Racism, and has even challenged Nigel Farage face-to-face on his party’s anti-immigration policies.
An immigrant from Ghana, who migrated with her parents and faced the harsh realities of trying to build a new life in Britain, she believes that unfair global economy is cause of people risking their lives in search of jobs and security.
Dr Paolo Novak, convenes SOAS’s Masters course in migration, mobility and development.
“Paolo has degrees in Business and International Finance (Bocconi University, Milan) and Development Studies (SOAS) and has worked for brokerage firms, investment banks, NGOs and UNHCR. His PhD field research was conducted in Pakistan, where he studied processes of institutional change in the protection and assistance regime for Afghan refugees”.
Movement for Justice by Any Means Possible (speaker tbc).
“Movement for Justice by any means necessary’ is what our name connotes, an organization always pushing forward, determined to unite all the movements of the oppressed in action, fighting for the political program needed to win justice for all. We believe that building an independent, integrated, mass, youth-led civil rights movement is necessary to achieve this aim and for the oppressed to win.”
Alex Scrivener, Global Justice now
Alex is a policy officer at Global Justice Now, writing and researching on all of our core campaigns. You can read his work on migration for Global Justice Now in this blog and our briefing, here.
