Rosemary Bechler is a Contributing Editor for openDemocracy.

Recent articles

 Rosemary Bechler (London, openDemocracy): responds to Anthony Barnett's coverage of the campaign against 42 days:

Thanks for the cogent reading of this important moment in the decline of the Westminster hall of mirrors. Doesn’t one need to include in a third episode in this drama? – the refusal of the two main political parties challenged in this bye-election to participate in debating the issues. For all the commenting and blogging, as in the case of the Iraq war and an ever-lengthening list of crucial decisions for the UK, we still have not been told why 42 days is deemed to be necessary to our national interest. All the talk simply obscures this ominous silence.

Thank you - all the MigrantVoice authors and bloggers for writing at short notice with passion and point. In a week we have moved beyond the shy introductions stage to 'pleased to meet you' and opened up a conversation on some of the big issues which has provided much food for thought. This excellent introduction will remain open not only for newcomers to browse, but for comment and addition.

Sonja Linden started out writing 'verbatim plays' and I like many others can testify to the 'palpable effect' these first hand accounts of detention and forced removal have had on her audiences. The Darfuris or Rwandans whose words and experiences she drew on thank her, however, in particular, for making their characters feisty and rounded - not just victims, however innocent. It's a moving account.

Rosemary Bechler (London, oD author): Quentin Peel has been lamenting the derailing of the Lisbon Treaty in the FT. But for a specific reason: EU members have just this week been coordinating their treatment of asylum as part of a wider plan to harmonise immigration rules - rules delayed for years because of the requirement of unanimity. As the prospect of qualified majority voting recede because of the Irish No-vote, so too does this harmonisation of immigration and asylum policy and what Peel says is 'arguably the most important single area of reform in the Lisbon Treaty'.

On one of the many earlier occasions when desperately provoked people broke out of Campsfield or some other detention centre, the message to the British people was not to approach them on any account because... the implication was.... or was it? ... let's say the suggestion ... that they were violent criminals of an indeterminate but horrendous kind.

No-one would expect a coffee-table book tete-a-tete. But 'Arresting Aram' and some of the other comments made this week about the 'surprising' pleasure and interest some of us have had in meeting the people involved - confirm my earlier suspicion that a much more 'dangerous' outcome, for the authorities at least, and for the militarisation of immigration and asylum which is under way, might be the formation of the kind of bridges that Jenny talks about in her last post: the bridge between the people behind bars and the people who don't know how innocent most of them are.