Launched in 1999 and updated regularly, Statewatch News includes our own reporting and writing as well as articles, announcements, documents and analyses from elsewhere on civil liberties, EU policies and state practices. You can receive updates in your inbox by signing up to our mailing list, or use our RSS feed to get instant alerts.
New EU rules on national identity cards and travel documents will "compel Ireland to introduce fingerprinting" of all holders of the Irish passport card, according to a document circulated by the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the EU.
The UK government has announced the signing of £4 billion of new contracts in an accommodation scheme that in its previous incarnation was criticised for leaving asylum seekers living in "squalid, unsafe slum conditions".
"The mayors of three large Italian cities are refusing to obey a controversial anti-immigration law penned by far-right deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, condemning it as unconstitutional."
"The 15 immigration activists found guilty of a terror offence for blocking the takeoff of a deportation charter flight from Stansted airport have launched an appeal against their convictions."
"Hundreds of pregnant women, unaccompanied children and survivors of torture are being abandoned in refugee camps on the Greek islands, an Oxfam report revealed today. It details how the system to identify and protect the most vulnerable people has broken down due to chronic understaffing and flawed processes."
"The number of migrants crossing the English Channel by boat is small - it pales in comparison to those making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean - but there has been a small spike in crossings in recent months."
"Undercover policing, however, is just one weapon in an entire armoury of political policing. The undercover policing scandal, which the Spycops in context papers are a response to, cannot be adequately understood without a wider historical view of the British state’s counter-subversion apparatus."
"A police spy appears to have misled a public inquiry about sexual relationships he had with two women while he was undercover."
At the end of December three new Regulations governing the Schengen Information System II (SIS II), the EU's largest database and information system for law enforcement and migration purposes, came into force.
"Drawing on new research material from ten European countries, Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives brings together a range of detailed accounts of the legal and bureaucratic processes by which asylum claims are decided."
"From unlawful killings, arbitrary detention and torture, to gang rape, slavery, and human trafficking, the report covers a 20-month period up to August 2018, and details a terrible litany of violations and abuses committed by a range of State officials, armed groups, smugglers and traffickers against migrants and refugees."
"This weekend a truly extraordinary story was unearthed regarding the machinations of the ‘Integrity Initiative’ (II), a British think tank funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the tune of £2.2m."
"A police force has admitted passing video footage and other information about disabled anti-fracking protesters to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)..."
"Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has said he would send proposals to the government aimed at changing German deportation laws in an effort to make it easier to send criminal foreigners back to their home countries."
"Anti-Semitic violence in the German capital reached new highs over 2018, with newly published statistics showing that at least five anti-Semitic incidents were reported weekly in Berlin alone. In total, 295 incidents were reported to the authorities in 2018 by mid-December – 24 of them were violent."
"This [racial profiling at the borders between the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and mainland UK] is likely to become worse after Brexit, for a larger number of people, whatever solution is reached about the border."
"European police should access computers and telephones with Trojan programs. Europol is now building up a "decryption platform“ in The Hague."
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