Fwd: Fw: Last call! - Boarding now: the CRN/ Churches Refugee Network- Annual Conference; Saturday May 19 at Holy Apostles, Pimlico,LONDON
RichardP
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Sent: Friday, 11 May, 2007 3:33:44 PM
Subject: Last call! - Boarding now: the CRN/ Churches Refugee Network- Annual Conference; Saturday May 19 at Holy Apostles, Pimlico,LONDON
'Meeting the Needs of Strangers'
Churches Refugee Network 4th Annual Conference
Saturday May 19th – 10.30-4.30, @ Holy Apostles, Pimlico, London SW1V 4LY
COME to HEAR and SEE and SHARE
and TASTE the falafel!
Quick, send in or phone your application to :
Wendy COOPER: wendy....@urc.org.uk tel.020-7916-8632
Churches throughout Britain support asylum seekers and refugees in many ways both practical and spiritual. They do so within a legal and political framework for asylum which continues to change for the worse at a high rate. They need information, the sharing of experiences, and mutual support.
The fourth national annual day conference of the Churches Refugee Network will be a forum at which inspirational new ideas for practice and policy are presented, project news is exchanged, new projects and campaigns are discussed, and where we seek and find encouragement we need to love one another, and build solidarity with those of our neighbours who are being treated as second class human beings. It is chaired by Canon Nicholas SAGOVSKY , Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey
This year our keynote speaker will be Yvonne MAHLUNGE, Zimbabwean Human Rights lawyer and leading Civil Rights activist in her country. She now lives in Britain and is also a legal Expert Witness on Zimbabwe, and a practising asylum lawyer. [1] She will share her thoughts on the ethical dimensions in current national and international asylum practice.
The Conference will present important new public campaigns and crucial new work on medical, welfare and legal provision for detained and non-detained asylumseekers.
The 'Strangers into Citizens' campaign proposes a two year pathway towards citizenship for the many thousands of asylumseekers whom our system has failed so dismally, yet whom the government is unable to send back for a variety of political and costly reasons. Austen IVEREIGH, campaign coordinator, will speak about the widely reported public events of a mass March and Rally of the May Day Bank Holiday, and outline further campaign aims and events.
The Independent Asylum Commission, a highly professional citizens' initiative aiming to formulate humane policies for asylum seekers instead of the current government approach aimed at the watertight exclusion from Europe of the persecuted and the poor. Jonathan COX, coordinator, will report.
Finally, Medical Justice is a new organisation founded 18 months ago to deal with some blatant abuses, errors and omission in medical care for detained asylum seekers. This committed and skilled network of volunteer doctors, barristers and activists, provides fast response medical assessments in detention centres for those whose health needs have been interrupted or denied by the detention services. It also provides Medico-Legal reports for those in Fast Track whose torture experiences have not been documented by the statutory services, and are hence denied credibility in their legal procedure. A team from MJ will discuss strategic policy, participating doctors' experiences of the law and the detention services, and asylum detainees' experiences, needs and wishes.
There will be songs of welcome and inspiration by the Ugandan Acholi choir from Stratford, as well as singers from Rwanda and elsewhere.
CRN churches from Sheffield, Nottingham, Leeds and elsewhere, will bring brief reports on their new initiatives and developments in refugee housing, legal assistance, welfare legal advice, and know-how on community integration.
And there will be ample lunchtime opportunity to network, with displays from a number of interesting NGO's.
[1] Yvonne MAHLUNGE is a Human Rights lawyer. In Zimbabwe she was a founder member of the opposition party the MDC in 1999 and of 'Lawyers for Human Rights', 'Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association' and the NCA National Constitutional Assembly. All these NGO's are still at the forefront of the fight for a free Zimbabwe. Arriving in the UK to study in 2003, she joined the Oxford-based British Zimbabwe Society and acted as country expert witness for the Refugee Legal Centre. In January 2005 she started asylum legal casework and is now a Senior Immigration Caseworker and Supervisor, awaiting her accreditation as a solicitor by the Law Society. She has a young family.