Statewatch

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To email us, replace [at] with @.

Email

• General enquiries: office [at] statewatch.org
• Send us an encrypted message via: secure [at] statewatch.org (PGP key)

To find out how to encrypt emails, you can use the guides here.

You can find individual staff members' contact details here.

Social media

• Twitter: @StatewatchEU
• Facebook: /statewatcheurope
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/57088988/
• Mastodon: https://mastodon.world/@statewatch
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Phone

• +44 (0) 7836 296 043

Post

• Statewatch, MDR, 88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH

Contribute material to Statewatch

We welcome submissions of material for publication on our website. See here for more information on contributing work to Statewatch.

"A coalition of seven leading civil society organisations has called on the European Commission to revoke the United Kingdom's data adequacy status, citing what they describe as a sustained and systemic erosion of privacy and data protection standards in the UK."

Full article (paywall); read the original statement.

“If a state won’t readmit its own nationals,” said Chris Jones, executive director of the migrant rights organisation Statewatch, “then you have no deportation.”

Full article in The New Humanitarian.

Staff

To contact individual staff members, replace [at] with @.

Chris Jones (Executive Director)

Chris has been working for Statewatch since 2010 and in September 2020 was appointed as Executive Director. He specialises in issues relating to policing, migration, privacy and data protection and security technologies.

• Email: chris [at] statewatch.org
• @earsinfingers

Romain Lanneau (Consultant Researcher)

Romain Lanneau is a legal researcher based in Amsterdam, publishing on the topics of migration, asylum, and the use of new technologies for public policies. In 2021, he was selected as a Bucerius Start Up PhD Fellow for a one-year project on the theme of 'Beyond Borders'. He is a recent graduate of a research LLM on International Migration and Refugee Law from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. In the past, he worked for several NGOs, including the largest research network on migration and refugee law in Europe, the Odysseus Academic Network.

• Email: romain [at] statewatch.org
• @romainlanneau

Yasha Maccanico (Researcher)

Yasha has worked for Statewatch since 1998, providing news coverage, analysis and translations to link EU policies to events on the ground in the justice and home affairs field in several member states (UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal). He has extensive public speaking experience in civil society and academic contexts and in 2019 completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in Policy Studies on the topic of 'European Immigration Policies as a Problem: State Power and Authoritarianism'.

• Email: yasha [at] statewatch.org
• @yashamac1

McKensie Marie (Head of Communications)

McKensie joined Statewatch in early 2024 to lead its communications efforts, shaping and implementing our communications strategy. She manages external outreach and oversees all aspects of our communication work. With experience as a communications specialist, designer, copywriter, and researcher, McKensie has worked with NGOs and charities across Europe and North America. She holds a BA in Culture & Political Studies from The Evergreen State College, USA, and an MA in Cultural Encounters & Communication Studies from Roskilde University, Denmark. In addition to her communications role, McKensie conducts academic research on international development, political communication, and cultural identity.

• Email: mckensie [at] statewatch.org
• @mckensiem

Rahmat Tavakkoli (Finance & Administration Worker)

Rahmat joined Statewatch in September 2021 to take care of our financial and administrative procedures, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and contribute to the smooth running of the office and the organization.

• Email admin [at] statewatch.org

Tony Bunyan (Founder, Director, 1991-2020; Director Emeritus, 2020-2024)

Tony passed away in September 2024. You can find our tribute to his life and work here.

 

Trustees

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche is Professor of Law at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, honorarium member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Her researches focus on the exigencies of the rule of law and their limitations in cases of exceptions: the situations of serious crises which allow the concentration of powers and restriction of rights (e.g. the use of the state of emergency), and the areas of legal confinement which are conducive to abuses of power and rights infringements (e.g. camps and centres where migrants and refugees are detained). She is member of the editorial board of various reviews and is involved in numerous academics networks regarding human rights law. You can find more information about her activities and publications on her personal webpage.

Laure Baudrihaye-Gérard

Laure is a lawyer based in Brussels, where she works on EU and Belgian criminal justice policy. She qualified as a solicitor in London, specialised in EU law and worked in private practice in both London and Brussels before studying criminology. After participating in several academic research projects, Laure joined Fair Trials, a criminal justice watchdog, in 2018. As Legal Director for Europe, she led on EU advocacy, strategic litigation in European courts and the coordination of a European-wide network of criminal defence lawyers, civil society and academic organisations. She has also been working as a prison monitor since 2019 in a large pre-trial detention prison in Brussels, and since 2020 heads up the appeals committee that adjudicates on complaints from detained people against the prison administration.

Jonathan Bloch

Jonathan Bloch studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically involved in South Africa in the worker and student movement and remains active in human rights circles in the UK. From 2002 until 2014 he chaired the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, one of the largest scholarship awarding organisations in South Africa. He was a councillor in the London Borough of Haringey 2002-14. He has co-authored several books on intelligence. He owns and runs a worldwide financial information business across four continents.

Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture with NGOs and migrant rights organisations. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Vicky has experience researching in immigration detention in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Denmark’s main deportation centre. She is currently embarking on a study of torture case file datasets with the Danish Institute Against Torture which aims to create a basis from which to better identify and thus respond to sexual torture and sexualised torturous violence with refugee survivors of torture more broadly.

Nadine Finch

Nadine was a member of the Statewatch contributors group for a number of years and also previously a trustee. She was a human rights barrister between 1992 and 2015 and an Upper Tribunal Judge from 2015 to 2020. She is now an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol and an Associate at Child Circle, a children's rights NGO based in Brussels.

About the Statewatch Library & Archive

The Statewatch Library & Archive contains an extensive collection of books, reports, journals, magazines, pamphlets and other ephemera. Much of it is “grey material” (informal/unofficial publications) on political and social struggles and movements. It covers topics such as:

• civil liberties and state power;
• policing;
• racism and anti-racism;
• the security and intelligence agencies;
• immigration, asylum and borders
• state surveillance;
• and much more.

Some materials dates back to the 1930s, though the bulk of the collection covers the period from the 1970s to the 1990s. Much of it is not available elsewhere.

Geographically, the collection mainly focuses on the UK, but there is also an extensive amount of material on countries elsewhere in Europe, the institutions of the EU (including border and police agencies such as Frontex and Europol), and other countries and regions around the world.

It is open by appointment by anyone who wishes to visit. It is currently only used to a limited extent. Users are mainly journalists, researchers, lawyers and academics.

Volunteering in the Library & Archive

We are looking for people to undertake the following tasks:

• Updating and maintaining the Library & Archive catalogue
  • Adding new material to the catalogue
  • Improving existing catalogue entries (e.g. with additional information, digitised copies of items)
  • Ensuring material is catalogued correctly
  • Ensuring the catalogue functions as intended
• Supporting visitors to the Library & Archive
  • Arranging bookings
  • Assisting visitors with finding relevant items
  • Keeping the collection in order and easily accessible
• Promoting the Library & Archive
  • Producing promotional materials to distribute to relevant organisations and institutions (e.g. NGOs, schools, colleges, universities)
  • Contributing to social media publicity materials, using items from the Library & Archive

Express your interest

If you are interested in volunteering in the Library & Archive, please write to library@statewatch.org with the following:

• A CV;
• A cover letter (no more than five hundred words) explaining your interest in and suitability for the role;
• An indication of your availability (hours and days per week)

Expressions of interest will be accepted and assessed on a rolling basis, there is no fixed closing date.

If you would like to visit the Library & Archive prior to submitting an expression of interest, please contact library@statewatch.org.

If you have any other questions, please contact library@statewatch.org.

The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.

Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.

The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.

The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.

Full story in The Guardian.

Our article: UK: Ministry of Justice secretly developing ‘murder prediction’ system

"In der EU soll der Verkauf von anonymen Prepaid-SIM-Karten untersagt werden. Das sieht ein Entwurf der polnischen Präsidentschaft des EU-Ministerrats vor, über den die britische Bürgerrechtsorganisation Statewatch berichtet. Eine persönliche Registrierung der Handy-Karten soll demnach in der gesamten Gemeinschaft verpflichtend werden. Laut dem Papier, das der Vorsitz Ende Januar an die Delegationen der Mitgliedsstaaten geschickt habe, seien Prepaid-SIM-Karten "zu einem Instrument für kriminelle Aktivitäten geworden". Sie stellten "eine echte Bedrohung für die öffentliche Sicherheit" dar."

Full article: "Größte Bedrohung": EU-Ratsspitze will anonyme SIM-Karten EU-weit verbieten