More information

Source

Failure of Greek authorities to set up migrant reception centers is jeopardizing mission

Officials of the European Union’s border monitoring agency Frontex are becoming increasingly frustrated with the failure of Greek authorities to contribute to their illegal immigration crackdown efforts at the Turkish border and are considering suspending the operation, Skai understands.

According to the agency’s executive director, Ilkka Laitinen, EU member states that have been contributing to a Frontex operation in the border region of Evros with manpower and equipment are becoming reluctant to continue their efforts as Greek authorities have failed to set up new migrant detention centers as promised.

A report issued by the agency showed that detentions at the Greek-Turkish land border increased by 20 percent in October compared to the same month last year. A statement issued by Frontex referred to “an absolute monthly record of 9,600 illegal border crossings.” “Average detections were over 300 irregular migrants crossing that border on a daily basis,” it said. The agency attributed the “dramatic development” to a combination of factors including the absence of sufficient detention facilities both in Greece and Turkey and the lack of adequate agreements for the readmission of immigrants from specific countries of origin.

Source: Ekathimerini

Frontex: Blood on your hands, now also in Evros region. In the end, not really surprising… Oh, you are just a coordinator?! What do you guys in Warsaw and at the border think, whose cameras and patrols forced the dead to hide themselves so long and so far from urban terrain that they froze to death?

Nobordercat Felicitas explains: “Rabbits instead of RABITS”.

Freedom of movement! NO BORDER!

Following the EU eastward expansion, countries like Bulgaria and Romania are progressively cracking down on those that try to cross their borders and rampantly working against freedom of movement. The Bulgarian government’s current target date for joining the Schengen agreement is 2012. The border control between Bulgaria and Turkey is cited as the biggest problem Bulgaria is faced with in order for the country to join Schengen. Following the participation of Bulgarian border police in FRONTEX operations along the Greek-Turkish border, there is talk of extending the agency’s operations to the border between Bulgaria and Turkey.

These developments, together with the deterioration of the migrants’ situation in neighboring Greece, are the two immediate reasons for organizing a No Border camp at the border between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey in the coming summer. The camp will run from the 25th August until the 29th of August 2011.

More information

Demonstration at Brussels Airport

Blockade of the entrance to the closed detention centre

TV-news (in French)

Demonstration at Brussels Airport and at the entrance of the closed detention centre against collective expulsion by the EU agency Frontex: At Brussels Airport  60 people protested against the collective expulsion of 61 Nigerians and Congolese by Frontex, the European Agency for management of the external borders. The deportees are 9 Nigerians and 3 Congolese who are in detention centers in Belgium and 49 from Great Britain, Germany, France, Switserland, Poland, Sweden and Norway.

The demonstrators are protesting against what they called a “flight of shame”: “Belgium hires for this collective expulsion a full Airbus plane, which will depart from the military airport of Melsbroek. It was seven years ago that Belgium rented such a big plane to send asylum seekers collectively back to their country. This way Belgium cooperates with the European anti-immigration politics. We must protest against this in every possible way.”

The protesters are demanding a radically different European migration policy and the closure of all detention centers for refugees. According to them, people there are illegally detained without any legal assistance, while they often have committed no crime at all. The demonstrators took their protest message first in the departure lounge and then into the airport arrival hall. That went on a noisy but orderly manner so that no incidents occurred.

Furthermore, there were again protests at Warsaw, where the Frontex headquarter is located.

The dynamic of the Arab spring is emanating into the entire world. The movements of revolt in the Maghreb encourage and give hope, not only because despotic regimes that have been believed invincible were chased away. Although the direction of further developments remain open it is obvious that the domino effect of the Tunisian jasmine revolution swiftly brought back the old insight that history is driven from below. The struggles are directed against the day-to-day poverty as well as against general oppression, they are as much about better living conditions as they are about dignity, in short: “bread and roses”.

The incredible days of Midan Al-Tahrir, the Liberation Square in Kairo signify the quest for new forms of self organisation and grassroots democracy. The desire for equal rights, autonomy and a share of the economic wealth is also mirrored in the boats crossing the Mediterranean towards Europe: today casting off from Tunisia while during the last years from North and West Africa . “Exit” – to claim one’s freedom of movement and to migrate in order to find a different, better life, and “Voice” – to raise one’s voice and struggle locally, are not contradictory, they are rather mutually intertwined.

This was even more obvious during the upheavals of 1989. The vote of the feet catalysed the protest movements against the oppressive regime of real socialism. The wall fell because the people enforced their freedom of movement. This makes the rhetoric of freedom by western politicians appear even more dishonest, as it is exactly these politicians who employ the threatening scenario of a flood to characterise the movements of migration from and across Northern Africa and to the end of legitimising the deployment of Frontex, the European border agency.

The governments of the EU have courted and supported the North African rulers, and showed a hesitant and slowing position towards the movements of revolt during the last weeks. This policy is not only driven by strong economic interests, but also due to the grown collaboration in the control of migration. The more effective a despot functioned as a watchdog for the externalised EU border regime, the more he became an important “partner”. Movements of migration from Africa were to be stemmed by any means necessary.

Thousandfold death and suffering, not only at sea, but also in the deserts and in the detention camps were and are the consequences of this nefarious complicity. The sub-Saharan migrants, who today are victims of pogrom-like persecution in Libya, have been systematically disenfranchised by the regime of Gaddafi and were subject to arbitrary abuse and maltreatment. The EU paid millions to the Libyan dictator and delivered surveillance technology. A similar cooperation exists with the Moroccan ruler, and until recently with the Tunisian regime. The Arab revolutions mark a potential collapse of the EU’s brutal project of exclusion in the Mediterranean.

Through a media campaign spreading fears about the collapse of migration control, the increased aggravation and militarisation of the EU border regime — symbolised by Frontex — is being legitimised. The European border agency adds to and extends the national control systems, which have aimed at the deterrence and the criminalisation of movements of migration for many decades. Frontex will be deployed vis-a-vis the North African coast, as it is already the case at the West African coast and at the Greek-Turkish border.

The fact that Italy is given overall control for “Operation Hermes“ is consequent and shockingly honest: as a result of the collaboration between Berlusconi and Gaddafi in recent years, countless acts of unlawful push backs were carried out in the Mediterranean. Italy performed a master piece in breaking all refugees’ conventions. And it is not by chance that those who save the lives of the boat people are being criminalized, as the cases of Cap Anamur and the Tunisian fishermen whose trials are still ongoing, show.

Migrants are seeking protection or a better life in Europe. They move against a gap of wealth and prosperity, rooted in Europe’s neocolonial relations of dominance and exploitation towards Africa. Therefore Europe’s universal claim of freedom and democracy must be measured against its tratment of those who demand equal rights by migrating. Frontex stands for the expansion of a deadly border regime – there is no place for it in a free world. Death at the external borders could be history by tomorrow. However politically there is no will to do so. Instead the EU authorities are waging an outright war at the external borders.

Within the EU disenfranchisement and deportation are part of a racist daily life. “Integration” is used as a means of pressure to enforce assimilation while exploitation in the low wage sector persists. However resistance and insistence thwart the selective manner in handling migration and challenges a system containing inequality and the lack of liberties. It is not by coincidence that in these turbulent times 300 Maghreb migrants went on hunger strike in Greece demanding their legalisation. Struggles for the right to stay as well as migrant strikes are flaring across Europe, since 15 years ago Sans Papiers in Paris – especially those from Africa – went public with the demand “Papers for everybody”.

The departures occuring in Northern Africa demonstrate what is possible. They refer to a new Arab World, a new Africa, a possible new Europe. They refer to new spaces of freedom and equality, to be created in transnational struggles: in Tunis, Kairo or Bengazi as well as in Europe and in the movements of migration, crisscrossing both continents.

8th of March 2011:
Afrique-Europe-Interact
Welcome to Europe
Network Critical Migration and Border Regime Research

List of signatories

If you want to sign the declaration, please send a short message to: fsf@antira.info

The European Court of Human Rights ruled last week that Belgium had violated the rights of an Afghan asylum seeker when it returned him to Greece, finding that the conditions in which he was held were inhuman and degrading. Germany had announced a few days earlier that it was suspending returns of asylum seekers to Greece for a year to give Greece time to “improve conditions.” Yet, border police from several EU countries, including Germany, are deployed to the Greek-Turkish border, where they transport migrants in windowless vans to these same degrading and inhuman conditions in Greek detention centers.

The case, M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece, concerns an Afghan who worked as a translator for the American military and fled, fearing revenge. He entered the EU through Greece, then sought asylum in Belgium. The European Court decided that Belgium should not have returned M.S.S. to Greece because Belgian officials knew he would be exposed to detention and living conditions that amounted to degrading treatment and because they knew of its failed asylum system, with an asylum approval rate of less than 0.1 percent in 2008.  The ruling directly challenges the “Dublin II regulation,” which says that the member state where an asylum seeker first sets foot is responsible for examining that person’s refugee claim.

With 960 similar cases challenging the return of asylum seekers to Greece pending before the European Court, M.S.S. represents an important judicial precedent.

But what does this judicial ruling say about current EU executive policies?  While many member states have stopped sending migrants to Greece, they have also recently deployed their national police forces to perform border enforcement in Greece as part of the rapid border intervention team (RABIT) under the EU border agency, Frontex. They apprehend migrants who cross the Evros River from Turkey, and turn them over to their Greek counterparts, who put them behind bars.

When M.S.S. filed his complaint with the court, countries like Germany could argue that they were not formally responsible for abuses in Greece.  They returned asylum seekers to Greece on the false presumption that they would be treated decently and provided a genuine opportunity to pursue refugee claims.  But because of Frontex, Germany and other EU members are no longer passive participants in this abusive system from afar, but have now become part and parcel of the systematic human rights violations of migrants in Greece.

During a recent Human Rights Watch mission to the Greece/Turkey border, a high-ranking Frontex official told us that the police working with Frontex are “not allowed” to enter the detention cells and have not witnessed what is going on there.

But we did look, and we know what is going on. We saw grossly overcrowded and unsanitary conditions where detainees did not have enough space to lie down to sleep, where women and children were held together in cells with unrelated men, and where toilet facilities were so inadequate that guards sometimes had to escort detainees to defecate and urinate in nearby fields. We met a 14-year-old Eritrean boy who told us he was beaten by the police, that he had to share a bed with five other migrant-children, that he did not have soap or enough to eat; and that guards took and threw away his SIM card, his only link to his family.

Even if Frontex personnel have not been allowed to look inside the detention centers, they have been close enough to smell their stench. In fact, as Der Spiegel reported, German police deployed as members of RABIT have complained of violence against detainees, and expressed worry that the police might be implicated in illegal acts. Eager to avoid criminal liability, they pleaded for clearer rules.

The European Commission recently decided to extend RABIT through March. But after the court’s landmark ruling, European governments should ask how it can be legal or proper for police from EU member states like Germany to go to Greece to apprehend migrants (many of whom are probably asylum seekers). They should ask how these police can turn a person over to Greek detention centers when it would be a breach of their human rights obligations for a similarly situated person to be put on a plane in Berlin, flown to Athens, and detained in those same facilities.

As German police have already blown the whistle on abuses they suspect are happening behind closed Greek detention center doors, and since Germany has already suspended Dublin II transfers to Greece, the German government should be the first to break with the RABIT deployment and withdraw its police presence at the Greek-Turkish border until Greece establishes humane conditions in its detention centers and provides an effective remedy for asylum seekers needing protection.

Troller, Senior Researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division, is the author of Left to Survive: Protection Breakdown for Unaccompanied Children in Greece.

Source: Human Rights Watch