Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Still Human Still Here: one year on
After a year of awesome campaigning by the STAR network, let us take a moment to look back on the brilliant achievments of students before we march towards another great year as a leader of the Let Them Work campaign.
What students did
Read, download, print and distribute the Still Human Still Here Campaign Summary
From October to December awareness-raising action from Bristol to Liverpool took place, whilst students from across the UK attended campaign action sessions at the STAR Conference. The conference also saw the London premiere of the Still Human Still Here DVD directed by Nick Broomfield. As momentum built over 10,000 campaign cards and 500 copies of the DVD were distributed across the network.
STAR’s best Action Day yet saw students from Plymouth to Glasgow via Belfast and Cardiff sleeping out in 21 different cities to demand the end of the destitution of refused asylum seekers. Over 700 committed students braved the cold, sleeping out in city centres, outside student unions and even in a churchyard. The sleep outs were preceded by a range of attention grabbing activities from Samba in Sussex to street plays in Oxford.
To capitalize on the brilliant efforts on Action Day, students from across the southern and midlands STAR regions met their MPs at a ‘targeted lobbying’ event at the Houses of Parliament in May. The students also presented a mammoth 455-page petition in support of the campaign to the Home Secretary’s office. The petition contained over 4,000 signatures collected in just a few hours on Action Day!
What’s happening now?
STAR continues to support Still Human Still Here through our work in the Let Them Work campaign, which includes an ask for the entitlement to work for people refused asylum while they cannot leave the UK.
And Still Human Still Here continues to build momentum, with research for the Independent Asylum Commission (IAC) showing that the use of destitution as a lever of policy against refused asylum seekers is opposed by 61% of the population. The research was presented in ‘Safe Return’, the IAC’s 2nd report of conclusions and recommendations published in July. The report also recommended that the use of vouchers for Section 4 (hard case) support be discontinued and that refused asylum seekers who cannot return to their country of origin after 6 months should be eligible to work. To check out ‘Safe Return’, the other reports of conclusions and for more about the IAC you can visit the IAC website.
In July the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, led calls for the right to work for Zimbabweans refused asylum. The call came in the same week as the Prime Minister announced that the forced removal of over 11,000 refused asylum seekers from Zimbabwe was to be halted. Gordon Brown said that the government was ‘actively looking at what we can do to support Zimbabweans in this country, who are failed asylum seekers who cannot work and are prevented from leaving the UK through no fault of their own’.
Posted by STAR team on 02/09/2008 at 01:31 PM
