New research revealed on today's Independent front page has found that black teenage boys guilty of homicide are 62% more likely to get convicted of murder rather than manslaughter, and that they get harsher sentences. Analysis of figures for 2009-17 shows one in four black teenage boys guilty of manslaughter were given maximum jail terms, while white children found guilty of the same crime were sentenced to no more than 10 years, with the majority getting less than four. It argues that “'cumulative' racial discrimination within policing and the judiciary means black young offenders are subjected to harsher punishments and therefore have worse life chances.”

​MP David Lammy commented: “As I found in my 2017 review of the criminal justice system, some of the difference in sentencing is the result of a ‘trust deficit’. Many BAME defendants simply still do not believe that the justice system will deliver less punitive treatment if they plead guilty”.  Read the full article.

An article by Dr Lawrence Brown claims the origins and spread of HIV can be seen as a legacy of Belgian colonisation in the Congo. "​We now know that HIV-1 emerged from Leopoldville in the 1920s and spread first among African people. The colonization of the Congolese by King Leopold II and the Belgians helps explain how the virus became a global pandemic".

It also comments how the disproportionate effects of HIV on sub-Saharan African people is "... precisely because European colonization exacted tremendous violence, extracted critical resources, disrupted social structures, and weakened the health of indigenous populations. European nations broke their promise to protect and promote the welfare of the indigenous African people. Instead the Belgians dehumanized and debased African societies producing the social determinants of death that gave rise to deadly infectious diseases. HIV-1 was ignited in Leopoldville, but the resulting HIV global pandemic is also the apparition of a grotesque and horrific legacy—the European infection of mass historical trauma and the devastation of Congolese health wrought by King Leopold II, the Force Publique, and Belgian colonisation."

​Read the full article here.