Closing borders as an automatic response
While the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime was greeted with joy by many Syrian refugees in Europe, this enthusiasm was immediately dampened by swift demands for repatriation of the same refugees by EU governments that now perceive Syria as a ‘safe’ country.
Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom immediately declared their intention to suspend the examination of Syrian asylum applications and after the fall of Assad, Tareq Alaows, an activist of the German refugee organisation Pro Asyl, received numerous concerned messages from Syrians in Germany: “They now have the feeling that tomorrow [Chancellor] Olaf Scholz will come and revoke their residence permit, or that the interior minister “will come, collect them and put them on a deportation plane, he said. Many people are not only unsettled and frightened by the debate, but are disappointed,” added Alaows, who himself fled Syria” as journalist Nette Nostlinger reported on Politico. Italy has also joined in closing its doors to Syrian refugees by suspending asylum applications despite the uncertain situation that lingers in Syria. Although the fall of al-Assad is significant, considering the numerous human rights violations against political opponents and the civil war that has ravaged the country since 2011, suspending asylum applications from Syria is a strategy that perfectly mirrors the current securitarian policy line of European countries. The same policy line characterised 2016, when during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ from Syria, instead of implementing immediate reception policies, the EU it preferred to sign agreements with Turkey (EU-Turkey Statement) in 2016 to contain migratory flows. Frontex (the EU agency for the control of maritime and land borders) and Greece were complicit in facilitating the systematic and illegal pushbacks in the Aegean Sea.
In this respect Francesco Strazzari, a professor of international relations at the Sant’Anna University of Pisa, wrote in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto: ‘In this scenario, unthinkable until yesterday, many European governments, the same ones that usually arrive late and divided over international crises, are showing themselves to be timely and synchronous, from Germany to Italy, in raising the drawbridges and preparing the expulsions’. In stark contrast, the same actors were also synchronous when it came to the rightful reception of Ukrainian refugees fleeing ongoing war, but in a welcoming and cooperative manner.
This contrast certainly makes it appear that the rights of migrants are based on a double standard that is deeply rooted in skin colour and nationality, with particular hostility towards those who come from the countries of the so-called ‘global south’. As Strazzari writes: ‘In front of the images of the Sednaya concentration camp and other Syrian prisons, in front of the Kurdish girls dragged like trophies by the militiamen, every politician and every commentator who in recent years has preached that Syrians should be deprived of humanitarian protection because “Syria is safe”, should be publicly asked to account for the irresponsibility of their statements’.
Pushbacks and detention as practice
The practice of closing borders is also in perfect synchrony with externalisation processes, i.e. the conclusion of agreements with third countries to contain migration flows or to transfer asylum procedures elsewhere. EU countries establish relationships with countries where human rights violations take place daily, such as the case of Italy with Tunisia, Libya and recently Albania. With the approval of the new Immigration Flows Decree (Decreto Flussi) following the Court of Rome’s ruling that made the detentions in Albania illegitimate, Italy has decided to change the list of ‘safe’ countries for repatriation by including Egypt and Bangladesh.
These safe country lists are a critical policy point because they are used to “fast track” procedures at the border, by systematically classifying as ‘safe’ those countries from which more asylum seekers come. They are therefore a conduit to the reduction of protection for asylum seekers from these supposedly ‘safe countries’.
In this respect, it seems, as Asgi (Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration) reported “that no account has been taken of proven situations of instability and/or human rights violations in the newly-added countries.” One cannot overlook that even before the latest modification, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had, through another Decree approved on May 7th, modified this list, expanding the number of countries on it “and including states in which serious human rights violations take place”, as remarked by jurist Vitalba Azzollini in Italian newspaper Domani. In the Guardian’s latest investigation on the matter in September, it has been reported that Tunisian authorities – which the EU and Italy keep financing to stop migration from countries on the African continent – not only reject people at the border but are involved in sexual violence and beatings against adults and minors, who are then left to die in the desert. Moreover, in a joint investigation by Lighthouse Reports, Irpi Media and other European and Tunisian newspapers, it was shown that the deserts where people – who are mostly black, discriminated against and persecuted by the Tunisian President Kais Saied’s racist and anti-migrant policies – are thrown, can be considered real ‘dumps’. Migrants are being left there without food or water but retain the bruises of beatings by the Tunisian National Guard. ‘The agreement,’ IpriMedia reported, “is not only about migration, but provides for the allocation of more than 100 million euros of EU funds for search and rescue operations, border management, the fight against human trafficking and return policy[…]”. Even though it has been evident for years that these agreements do not take the protection of human rights into account at all, Irpi Media highlights that ‘between 2015 and 2021 alone, the EU has disbursed a total of more than €400 million to Tunisia, Morocco (at least €234 million) and Mauritania (at least 81.5 million) under its largest migration fund, the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (Eeutf), which was launched as an emergency instrument in 2015 to tackle the so-called “migration crisis”.
Where systematic pushbacks are not considered enough by governments, even if they are already in violation of both the EU rules contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Geneva Convention in Article 33 in doing so, the detention of migrants comes into play. In these detention systems people seeking asylum and help are treated as criminals simply because they do not hold residence permits. Although the Italy-Albania Protocol has been a failure and the detention centres in Albania now sit empty – this does not detract from the seriousness just of devising such a plan. A plan in which people ‘rescued’ by the Italian coast guard, and therefore in Italian territory – are illegally deported to another country.
The assumption emphasised by the government while doing so, is that the people chosen for deportation would only be “non-vulnerable adults” coming from countries considered “safe”, but this is a misrepresentation that, again, seriously undermines the rights of migrants. Firstly, after the Italian military ship “Libra” deported 12 migrants to Albania in October, 4 of them had to be taken back to Italy because 2 were minors and the other 2 were in vulnerable conditions. Secondly, as various NGOs, including Emergency and Sos Mediterranea, denounced in a joint communiqué, “[…] in the middle of the sea, on board the military ship Libra as on board the Italian patrol boats, the conditions do not exist for an adequate assessment of a person’s state of health to be carried out’ and ‘there is no medical clinic or rooms used for this purpose that would guarantee adequate privacy and an appropriate perception of a safe place, just as there are no instruments capable of diagnosing certain clinical conditions and pathologies, acute or chronic. This strong limitation becomes even more evident in the presence of a large number of people to be evaluated in a short time.”
Considering that most people rescued have often had to face terrible abuses in Libya or Tunisia, one has to wonder on what basis these screenings are carried out, which in most cases do not take into account the psycho-physical trauma suffered by migrants. Such trauma continues to be ignored, for example, even in the Centres for Repatriation (CPR) in Italy, which are constantly described in numerous reports as unhealthy places, where inhuman and degrading conditions abound. The latest report by the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights (CILD), ‘Chiusi in gabbia” (Closed in a Cage) on Rome’s CPR – currently managed by the multinational company ORS – reveals an unsustainable condition. From 2021 to date, the report from CILD reported that ‘the Asl (the national healthcare institution) has declared that it has carried out one inspection in the last three years, only because it was urged to do so by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Rome; (ii) the Prefecture has limited itself to carrying out only 6 inspections, imposing penalty decrees on ORS for a total of 47,359 euros because of the very serious criticalities found (e.g. failure to distribute necessities; problems concerning the preservation and quality of food; failure to computerise the outpatient clinic and irregular compilation of health documentation: the latter only after the former Guarantor had filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office because of the risk of the gaps and tampering with the critical events registers)”.
Moreover, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), following several inspections, recently condemned Italy for inhumane treatment inside the CPRs, including abuse in the administration of psychotropic drugs and violence by the police. It was in these conditions that Ousmane Sylla, in his early twenties and originally from Guinea, took his own life. In this context, migrants continue to be criminalised detained and punished without providing structural solutions to their irregular status and, consequently, their social marginality.
Social marginality as a structure
It is because of this marginality that Satnam Singh, an Indian fruit picker who was being exploited by an Italian company in the Agro Pontino area (in the region of Lazio, Italy), was left to die after losing an arm. Despite the initial attention given by the media to this case, the systemic exploitation that characterises the agricultural sector fell into oblivion. In Italy, migrant women and men continue to work, in a condition of occupational segregation, in the most dangerous sectors, earning very little or where a semi-slavery system is in force. According to the latest Idos 2024 report on immigration, ‘more than 6 out of 10 migrant workers carry out blue-collar or unskilled jobs (61.6% vs. 29.5% of Italians) and do not see their conditions improve with occupational seniority, while less than 9 out of 100 work in a skilled profession (8.7% vs. 38.6% of Italians). A very restricted segment of the market continues to be reserved for them, given that the first 19 professions already absorb more than 50% of them (for Italians it takes 47). As far as migrant women are concerned, more than half are employed in just four professions: domestic helpers, caregivers, office and shop cleaners, and waitresses”. Finally, the government is about to approve the Security Decree (Ddl 1660), which in addition to drastically reducing individual freedoms, especially the freedom to protest, severely curtails forms of dissent even for people locked up in prisons and CPRs, preventing people without a residence permit from having a sim card for their phone, yet another discrimination that leads to social exclusion.
An inexorable deterioration of fundamental rights
We are now at a point of no return, where migrants’ rights are not protected and are instead systematically violated by the institutions that should, at least in theory, be their watchdog.
There is an urgent need for a change of course that protects not only the right to freedom of movement, guaranteeing safe routes for those who wish to move or are forced to move, but also promotes processes of regularisation and access to services. This is the only real way to counter systemic marginalisation and discrimination.
Cover photo by Alessia Perretti/Creative Commons
