Dear Friedrich Joussen,

We, the undersigned, call for the immediate stop to your collaboration with the UK Home Office in running chartered deportation flights as part of the UK Home Office’s Hostile Environment policy.

TUI INVOLVEMENT IN DEPORTATIONS:

Between June and December 2020, you were the primary airline operating deportations as part of ‘Operation Sillath’, a pre-Brexit initiative launched by the UK home office to deport people who have entered the UK via perilous channel crossings. Your actions come as part of the increasing normalisation of such violent practices, from the high-profile and legally dubious* deportation of the “Jamaica 50,” to the many deportation flights and immigration raids happening every month, which go mostly unnoticed by the general public. We do not forget those who have died as a result of the UK’s violent immigration system.

Part of this system is the racist and brutal Hostile Environment policy, which aims to compound the violence of an already violent system by aiming, as Theresa May put it in 2012 interview, to create a ‘really hostile environment’** for migrants in the UK via the implementation of citizen on citizen immigration checks. Almost 10 years down the line, we know that this policy has caused unbearable trauma and suffering in the lives of those it targets.

With your actions, you are supporting a system that is widely condemned, and employs increasingly rampant and open surveillance, racist violence and disregard of human rights legislation. Since 2012, The Hostile Environment policy has meant the slow creep of a ‘papers, please’** approach in an ever-widening number of environments- from hospitals to schools, workplaces to housing. Those on the sharp end of these injustices are denied access to public services, made to pay sky-high bills for essential healthcare, denied the right to work, the right to rent- the right to exist. Many are then snatched in the middle of the night and detained, later to be forced on to deportation flights.

OUR DEMANDS FOR TUI:

We, the undersigned, are calling on TUI to act in the interests of justice, and discontinue your collaboration with the UK Home Office. Stop upholding this system. Stop the planes.

There is a long history of individual consumers choosing to boycott and divest from corporations that uphold oppressive regimes, from the international BDS movement to the Boycott Turkey campaign.
In calling on TUI to end their collaboration with the Home Office, we make clear that we will refuse to stand by as long as corporations continue to quietly profit from such abhorrent practices.

We cannot continue to support TUI financially, in the knowledge that the flipside to their family-friendly image is a corporation that has, and continues to, value profit margins above the lives of those seeking refuge in the UK- often who have fled war, conflict, and other forms of violence, only to face further violence on our shores.

ACTION IS NEEDED:

It is not too late to make the decision to stop flying these planes, and stop forcibly removing people from the UK. We, the undersigned, will commit to a boycott of TUI until this demand is met.

Signed:

References:
*https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jamaica-deportation-flight-uk-home-office-government-black-british-citizens-a9328616.html
**https://www.freemovement.org.uk/briefing-what-is-the-hostile-environment-where-does-it-come-from-who-does-it-affect/