Europe is breaking with the obligation to recognize the right to asylum of people forced to leave their country of origin. One European government after another turns its back on one of the main guarantees of international law, developed after the Holocaust and World War II. The protection of refugees, enshrined in international conventions 70 years ago, is being reduced at times on the continent and is already a dead letter in countries like Italy, which has begun the deportation of migrants, or in Finland and Poland, willing to temporarily suspend the refugee law.
The EU’s break with the traditional concept of the right to asylum is so evident that the European summit this Thursday in Brussels debated the possibility of deporting potential refugees to third countries. And the plan has been defended by the European Commission itself, which until recently considered the unceremonious expulsion of asylum seekers to be incompatible with Community law.
Now Brussels remains silent in the face of the drift of Rome or Warsaw. And under the presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission has gone from being concerned about alleged violations of the right to asylum to being interested in checking whether the kick outwards at the borders can calm that part of public opinion anguished by supposedly migration. uncontrolled.
The deportation, launched this week by the Italian Government of Georgia Meloni, seeks to dissuade people who, in their fight to save their lives, consider seeking refuge on European soil. It is not about stopping migratory flows, which respond to structural reasons linked to the economic and social reality of the 21st century, impossible to avoid with the simple confinement of a few dozen or hundreds of people in an internment camp as Meloni or Alberto Núñez intend. Feijóo. The objective of this measure is, more than anything, to break the taboo that the expulsion of an asylum seeker contravenes international legislation and even the most basic sense of humanity.
The supporters of this rupture, among whom are a good part of the European parliamentary group – from Nordic social democrats to southern ultras and a good part of the European People’s Party – add some compelling reasons and others that are merely opportunistic or downright false. The anti-immigration offensive often exploits distorted perceptions about the levels of insecurity or the percentages of the foreign population. And it affects the same in areas with full employment, such as Flanders or Lombardy, as in impoverished areas such as the northwest of France or in demographic decline such as Hungary.
But it is also true that the growing migratory mobility throughout the planet has exponentially accelerated the potential transfers of people from one country to another. The number of migrants globally has increased from 153 million in 1990 to 281 million in 2020. And the widespread awareness in much of the Global South that the hope for a better life is found in the countries of the north has made Europe and The United States is an almost irresistible pole of attraction for people with the possibility of starting the adventure of migration.
It also seems proven that migratory pressure has become an instrument of destabilization at the service of certain regimes. Countries neighboring the EU do not hesitate to use the immigration tap as a weapon for hybrid war or for simple political or economic blackmail.
The alert in Brussels was raised, for example, in 2021, when the Putin-Lukashenko clamp set up an airlift of migrants from Egypt, Syria or Turkey to launch them against the EU borders in Poland or Lithuania. The European Commission managed to deactivate the catapult with warnings to the countries that facilitated flights to Russia and Belarus, even knowing that the final destination of many passengers was to become a weapon against Europe. But the precedent was clear.
Already before, in 2015, Erdogan’s Turkey triggered a sudden exodus to Europe of Syrian refugees settled on Turkish soil since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria four years earlier. There was no obvious reason for the departure of hundreds of thousands of Syrians towards European territory, but the migration crisis activated by Ankara allowed the Turkish leader to extract billions of euros from the EU.
Meloni’s Italy, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Geert Wilders’ Netherlands now want to go down another notch in immigration policy. They are not satisfied with paying for a containment dam like the Turkish one. The next step is the outsourcing of reception centres, so that asylum seekers wait for their applications to be approved or rejected in places like Albania, Uganda or any other country that offers them. Little by little, Europe is once again looking into the abyss that it left behind 80 years ago, with the development of international law that included new crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity and the obligation to open the doors of a country to the neighbor that calls asking. help to save his life.