The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Category: Campaign of the week

Women In Exile

Refugee women fighting for their rights


08/01/2021

Women in Exile is an initiative of refugee women founded in Brandenburg in 2002 by refugee women to fight for their rights. We decided to organize as a refugee women’s group because we have made the experience that refugee women are doubly discriminated against not only by the racist and discriminative general refugee laws but also as women.​

Refugees are obligated to live in “collective accommodations“ where they are entitled to a 6sqm² space, in these narrow spaces they share not only the rooms but facilities such as kitchen, toilets and bathrooms. This results in lots of conflicts inside the collective homes, including physical and sexual violence for women. Thus our campaign „No lager for women and children, Abolish all lagers“.

In 2011,Women in Exile and activists in solidarity without flight background, founded Women in Exile and Friends. Our fights are focused on the abolition of all laws discriminatory to asylum seekers and migrants and on the interconnections of racism and sexism. Together we develop strategies to achieve political change and take our protest against the inhuman living conditions of refugee women to the public

Our fundamental political goal is the utopia of a just society without exclusion and discrimination, with equal rights for all, irrespective of where they come from and where they go to. We perceive ourself as a bridge between the refugee and the feminist movement. Our experience is, that women can relate to each other, regardless of all differences like age, origin, religion, status, sexual orientation or other factors, and can make an impact together.

We meet monthly and make regular visits to refugee women in the “collective accommodation” in Brandenburg to exchange experiences . This way we find out about the living conditions in each specific Heim and the women`s immediate needs. Together through workshops and seminars, we educate ourselves to become peers for those who come after us and develop perspectives to improve our already difficult living situation.

Through our peer education, we have managed to encourage and help several refugee women not only to demand for their rights but to organise themselves in their different areas nationalwide to become loud and bring out the problems they are facing during the asly procedure to the public. We develop perspectives to fight for our rights in the asylum procedure and to defend ourselves against sexualised violence, discrimination, and exclusion.

Throughout the years we have built different local and national wide networks and together we plan campaigns and political actions, such as our raft tour in 2014 and several bus national wide bus tours. We demonstrate, give interviews to the media and speeches in meetings to let society know of the problems faced by refugee women and their demands.

Contact info[at]women-in-exile.net.

You can financially support Women In Exile here

Right2TheCity

Deutsche Wohnen &Co Enteignen … but in English


18/12/2020

Right2TheCity was launched on 16th December 2020 as an English-speaking working group of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (DWE). The idea for the working group emerged from within DWE and through discussions with other activist organisations including Brazilian tenants, Unidas Podemos and Berlin Migrant Workers.

The topics of the working group are open. Some ideas have been collected in the process already: translations, building a coalition with other migrant organizations and the collection of “political” signatures from the 25% of Berliners who do not have a German passport and are therefore ineligible to officially sign in support of the referendum.

People attending Wednesday’s launch meeting said that they were interested in the following topics: addressing housing precarity, tackling homelessness, socializing housing, fighting gentrification, removing housing from the market, working on strategy and coalescing with housing movements in Europe.

The group plans to be engaged in the following actions:

  • Mass canvassing of housing estates

  • Argumentation training (in English, already exists in German)

  • Supporting Kiez teams that don’t exist yet

  • Translations of argumentation texts and the website

  • Scandalizing the fact that because you need to have a German passport to vote in the referendum a quarter of people renting have been disenfranchised

  • Scandalizing the topic of “Anmeldungen”

  • Improving the internet and social media presence of DWE

  • Addressing intersections: racist society, capitalist housing market, covid-19 effects

  • Engaging with faith groups to get them to join the campaign

  • Collecting data in order to clarify how unequal access to housing is

Links are available to a Telegram group and an extra group for translators. Meetings will be every second Wednesday at 7pm, starting on 30th December. For more information, contact right2thecity@dwenteignen.de.

BAYAN Europe

Alliance of Filipino progressive organizations


11/12/2020

The broadest and most comprehensive alliance of Filipino progressive organizations has come to Europe! Defamation and malign are nothing but an abortive fling to defeat the national democratic mass movements. Those fake surrenderees, and impudent red-tagging against the individuals and organizations in an insistent that the ND movement is waning and irrelevant is as pretentious as the claim that the Philippines is no longer a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society.

The launching of BAYAN-Europe on 12 December 2020 was the Filipino migrants’ answer to the call on intensifying the struggle against the US/China-Duterte administration!

BAYAN Europe is an alliance of Filipino organizations constituting of migrant workers, immigrants, students, youth, women, LGBTQ+, artists and church people.

As the regional information bureau of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), BAYAN Europe aims to advance the unity amongst the Filipino-led organizations in the continent through education, organization and mobilization for the national-democratic aspirations of the Filipino people.

theleftberlin

News and activities for and about the international left in Berlin


04/12/2020

theleftberlin.com was launched in October 2019 as a replacement for theleftberlin.wordpress.com, which had been the website for the Berlin LINKE Internationals. It shares its predecessor’s aim to inform non-Germans in Berlin about German politics and to let the German Left know about the international activists and organisations in their city.

theleftberlin is a website by activists for activists and an important part of the Website – and the weekly Newsletter that we produce – is informing people of activities and events in Berlin, especially those which are of interest to an audience which does not have German as its first language. We also want to reflect and contribute to the debate on the international Left.

Although theleftberlin maintains close links with the Berlin LINKE Internationals, it has an editorial autonomy and attempts to reflect a range of debate on the left. The editorial team has a short online meeting every Sunday to discuss the articles which we want to publish. Meetings are open, and we would love to see new faces on our editorial board.

We have taken a recent decision to concentrate on publishing original texts, translations of texts which were not previously available in English and the reproduction of important texts from the Global South which have not yet reached a Western audience. To help us do this, we are looking for more writers, editors and translators to join our team. We would also appreciate the help of IT people and anyone who is active on social media to publicize what we publish.

If you would like to know more about theleftberlin or are interested in joining our editorial team, please contact us at teamleftberlin@gmail.com. You can join our mailing list by adding your e-mail address in the bottom left of this page

Berliner Mieterverein

Representing tenants in Berlin


27/11/2020

The Berlin Mieterverein (Berlin Tenants’ Association) represents its members` interests in all questions concerning the lease of their accommodation. Since 1888 we have been committed to improving tenants` rights and a social housing policy. We support reasonable rents backed by legislation. We also support the development of new social and affordable housing and other urban developments, while avoiding the displacement of tenants. With more than 160,000 members the Berlin Tenants’ Association is the largest in Germany.

We have lawyers, assessors, energy consultants and other staff to support you in any disputes with your landlords.

We offer our members

  • Personal legal advice in several consulting centers throughout the city

  • Telephone advice via hotline

  • Advice by return of mail

  • Correspondence with landlords

  • Information on tenancy law on our website, flyers and the tenants’ magazine (MieterMagazin)

  • Protection insurance for tenancy law, which may pay legal costs after a three month waiting period from the start of the membership.

On 23 February 2020 an new Berlin law called the Mietendeckel (Rent Freeze), came into effect. The law is effective for a period of five years. Civil-law agreements between tenant and landlord thus are no longer valid if they go beyond the rent caps defined by public law of the federal state of Berlin.

The Mietendeckel consists of four sections: