Legal challenge to ‘Go Home’ vans pilot

Did you see the ‘Go Home’ advert on vans, calling for illegal immigrants to ‘Go Home’? Did you find it offensive? Was the advert legal? 

In July 2013, vans were sent around London encouraging illegal immigrants to ‘Go Home’ – the area where I live was targeted, and was Barnet, Hounslow, Barking and Dagenham, Ealing, Brent and Redbridge. At the same time, a number of immigration ‘spot checks’ took place in and around train stations on suspected illegal immigrants. 

The Advertising Standards Campaign received numerous complaints from the public on the Go Home campaign. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) intends to ‘ask questions about the extent to which the Home Office complied with its public sector equality duty’ on the campaign. The Duty requires public bodies to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination and harassment and to foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. 

A legal challenge has been brought on behalf of the Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London, on the basis that the initiative failed to comply with the public sector equality duty of the Equality Act. 

Rachel Robinson, policy officer at human rights campaign group Liberty, said: ‘Driving National Front-style slogans around ethnically-diverse areas was bound to cause deep offence.’ 

Numerous local authorities, MPs and community groups of the areas where the vans were deployed have expressed anger at not having been consulted on the initiative. 

The EHRC also intends investigating the use of immigration spot checks to assess whether unlawful discrimination occurred. The anti-racism campaigner Doreen Lawrence has questioned the apparent focus on non-white people in operations being carried out. The Home Office has denied that officials broke the law as these were ‘racist’ spot checks made simply on the basis of peoples’ skin colour.

To read a BBC report (9 August), click here

To read a Sky News report (3 August), and watch a dvd clip of immigration officers carrying out arrests, click here

To read a Guardian report (3 August), click here