Komitee für Grundrechte
und Demokratie e. V.
Aquinostr.
7-11
50670
Köln
Telefon:
0049 - 221 / 972 69-20 oder -30
Telefax:
0049 - 221 / 972 69-31
email:
info@grundrechtekomitee.de
appell@grundrechtekomitee.de
Berlin/Cologne,
March 2005
International
appeal
The European
Union's extraterritorial refugee
camps
We demand a
public inspection of the inhumane
internment camps of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean region
in order
to support the demand for their immediate closure.
What is this
appeal about? In May this
year, the
EU is going to initiate its third attempt to probe the foreign policy
situation
to assess if it can set up extraterritorial refugee camps in northern
Africa.
The German interior minister Otto Schily is planning to visit the
governments
of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in order to clear up earlier
„misunderstandings“ on the matter: up to now, the governments of these
countries are not willing to agree to the building of EU camps on
northern
African territory on a mere whim from Berlin, Rome or London.
Newspapers there
sarcastically report that Germany is known to be the „world champion“
in the
building of camps and that it really was not necessary to export that
know-how.
Tony Blair had voiced the idea of externalising refugee camps at the
beginning
of the 2003 Iraq war, calling on the EU to send asylum seekers back to
areas
outside the EU's external borders. The EU, in accordance with his plan,
would
then be able to select a few asylum seekers who would be allowed to
enter. In
the summer of 2004, the Italian interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu,
together
with Otto Schily, seized Blair's proposal to avert responsibility
from
the EU for the thousands of deaths of boat people occurring in the
Mediterranean region since the implementation of the EU's restrictive
militarised asylum and migration policy. Schily's new initiative from
May 2005
will probably be spearheaded under the name of the „fight against
global
terrorism“. Because the European security doctrine alleges that the
same North
African networks responsible for organising terrorism are also
responsible for
the migration of boat people.
In
a Europe-wide appeal from 12.10.2004, numerous initiatives and
individuals have already demanded the closure of all extraterritorial
EU camps
and a halt to the building of new camps (see http://no-camps.org/).
It is now the time to publicly scrutinise the existing camps and
prisons in the
Mediterranean region because human rights groups are being denied
access to
these camps and there are various indications that secret camps are
being built
nevertheless.
Boat
people targeted. Although
an more
accessible route for a poor Senegalese or Algerian refugee is to cross
the
Mediterranean Sea to Europe by wooden boat (pateras), this option takes
a lot
of determination and daringness, resulting in approximately 10,000
deaths since
the creation of the visa regime towards North African states in 1992.
It is,
however, not the question of compensation payments that is currently
debated in
Europe, nor is it asked who is responsible for the mass deaths at sea;
instead
it is the economic „damage“ that boat people allegedly cause after
successful
passage to the EU that is widely debated.
According
to official figures, boat people only constitute a very small
percentage of the around 500,000 people who cross the EU's southern
borders
secretly and without documentation year to year. It is the „poor“ that
have to
resort to the risky passage by boat. For those who can afford it
or have
connections with friends or relatives migration can be an easier task
by buying
a well forged passport and travelling by plane or crossing the straits
with one
of the major car ferries’. This way of migration is a costly business
and it is
argued that „criminal networks“ are profiteering in an organised
manner. In the
case of Eastern Europe, however, most of these „networks“ have proven
to be
police constructs rather than reality, with everything being defined as
„criminal“ that opposes those legal forms of EU migration politics that
fall
short of human rights principles.
The
border regime that drives migration into „illegality“ is based on
utilitarian principles and driven by European economic interests. The
European
labour market relies on undocumented workers. Especially in the
Mediterranean
region, the EU's border control measures reinforce a marked difference
in
living standards. With the visa regime, Europe's interior ministers are
themselves responsible for refugees and migrants crossing the
Mediterranean
secretly and without documentation. Unlike the future plans to lift
entry
restrictions for Eastern Europeans over a period of time, such plans do
not
exist for the countries of the South. At the same time, many North
African
states have concluded readmission agreements with western European
countries,
with far-reaching consequences, as these states are now obliged to
search for
and deport migrants in transit. In return, Spain and Italy have merely
agreed
to allow entry for a minimal quota of legal workers from selected
northern
African countries. In general, services on behalf of the EU in return
for the
migration political cooperation of northern African states are lacking,
or they
take place in the energy sector (investments in North African gas or
oil
production). The servility of northern African governments with regard
to
extraterritorial EU refugee camps appears to be reaching its limits.
However,
the tenacity of those regimes against EU demands is not led by
a principled humanitarian stance in favour of refugees and against
camps per
se. This is why in future the question will be how much the EU is
willing
to give politically and financially for the creation of such camps.
The
secret nature of extraterritorial camps.
For the last two to three years, the biggest deportation camps of the
EU have
been created on the Canary Islands, in southern Spain and on the
southern
islands of Italy. They are being controlled by para-military forces and
are not
accessible to human right’s groups (including UNHCR) or journalists.
These
camps are the organisational preconditions for mass deportations to the
future
camps in North Africa. The first mass airlift deportation in Europe's
post-war
history took place in October 2004: under military command, more than
1000
refugees were deported from southern Italy to Libya, without an
examination of
their identity or an individual examination of their reasons for
flight. This
constituted a blatant violation of the Geneva Refugee Convention and
the
European Convention of Human Rights.
At
the same time, Rocco Buttiglione, the designated and later suspended
EU commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs (!) assured during his
hearing
before the European Parliament that he had never proposed „to create
concentration camps in north Africa to deport illegals there“, and that
he was
not intending to make such a proposal in the future (Minutes of the
Hearings, Handelsblatt,
5.10.2004). Buttiglione was criticised by some members of parliament
after he
described his vision of camps around Europe as a „good idea“ during
several
interviews (amongst others on the radio station Deutschlandfunk
on
27.8.2004). He clarified his ideas of „reception centres“ by saying
that they
should only be created with the consent and cooperation of the
sovereign states
on the other side of the Mediterranean. He further proposed that they
could
also serve to separate and select the desired economic migrants to
Europe (Die
Welt, 31.8.2004; Frankfurter Rundschau, 6.10.2004).
The
proposal to create extraterritorial EU camps was received with a
storm of protests in Europe. Furthermore, the North African governments
have
not provided land for future EU reception centres (Schily. FAZ,
23.07.2004). The concept though is being steadily refined in order to
realise
these camps, even if this is being continually denied in official
statements:
at their informal meeting in Scheveningen on 30 September to 1 October
2004,
the EU's justice and interior ministers agreed in principle that the EU
is
striving for the creation of „reception camps for asylum seekers“ in
Algeria,
Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Libya, not under supervision of the EU
but of
the respective countries. On 31 January this year, the EU interior
minister’s
conference in Luxemburg, however, stated that the idea of
extraterritorial
camps had been „buried“. Because of the boat people in the
Mediterranean, it
was said, in future the EU would accept some quota refugees from North
Africa.
How
the camps can nevertheless become reality is exemplified by
extraterritorial camps and prisons run by the US in some north African
states
to enable the use of torture on prisoners (compare Jane Mayer,
'Outsourcing
Torture' in: The New Yorker, 14.2.2005): the already existing
infrastructure in those countries - the prisons, the airports, the
torture
institutions and torture personnel - are being used secretly for EU and
US
interests.
It
is unlikely that the creation of the extraterritorial refugee camps
will not be advertised with boards informing the passer-by that „The EU
is
building here!“. The concept behind the camps is more one of hired
complicity.
At the same time, North African states are supposed to be turned into
„appropriate first asylum states“. The EU is presenting this as a
strategy in
accord with human rights that appears to be strengthening the
protection of
refugees outside of Europe. No matter how the European camp visions
will be
realised in law and practise: for those imprisoned, neither
constitutional
rights nor recourse to the courts will apply (Schily, Süddeutsche
Zeitung,
2.8.2004) and the authorities will know how to obscure the financing,
the
administrative responsibility and accountability.
The
fact that chain deportations (migrants are
deported from one country to the
other until they are back again to the country of origin)
stated taking place from Europe in particular to Mali, Niger, Nigeria
and Ghana became known already before the Italian mass deportation to
Libya
last October: refugees who had been deported from south European
countries had
reported back about military desert camps in North African countries in
which
they were interned for some time. Some were subsequently driven to and
abandoned in border regions in the Sahara. Many migrants, it has been
reported,
have not survived this ordeal and collapsed or died of thirst.
It
is to be feared that once the extraterritorial camps have been
institutionalised, the situation of refugees and undocumented migrants
within
Europe will become even worse. The repression of irregular migration
will be
increased with far-reaching consequences. Tony Blair's comprehensive
plan
foresees the deportation of all asylum seekers to outside the EU's
borders.
Once these capacities exist, they will be used - resulting in a Europe
with
comprehensive population control measures and only hired or carefully
selected
migrants and refugees will be granted access.
This
is why we demand that delegations of members of national and the EU
parliament as well as human rights groups from the EU and from north
African
states visit the regions where extraterritorial camps are located and
visit the
externalised prisons financed by the EU along the migration routes as
soon as
possible, in order to work towards their closure. The agenda includes
an
inspection of the big deportation camps in southern Spain and southern
Italy as
well as the desert camps. It is of uttermost importance to create a
critical
publicity around the EU's strategy to build camps around Europe, which
violates
international human rights obligations, and to expose the developing
complicity
in the creation of these camps.
Support
the appeal
With
this appeal we want to call on the European public, civil society and
national
and EU members of parliament. Please distribute this appeal
(translations
available under
http://www.grundrechtekomitee.de/ub_showarticle.php?articleID=151).
Initiatives
and organisations can sign this appeal by 20 July 2005 by
mailing appell@grundrechtekomitee.de.
The names of
signatories will be collected on the above named website and all groups
will
receive a complete list of signatories after 20 July, with which they
can
inform their local media about the delegations planning to visit the
camps.
Public
persons who are willing to accompany such a delegation and thereby
publicise it
should also contact the Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie,
stating
your address and e-mail.
Helmut
Dietrich / Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration
Dirk
Vogelskamp / Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie