Eritreans land in Lampedusa, July 2015. Demotix/Carmine Orlando.All rights reserved.At a
meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, Angela Merkel declared that the Dublin Agreement is over.
The
principle of the agreement, which has dominated European migration policy for
almost 20 years, is that whoever wants to claim asylum within the EU must do so
at the country of their first arrival and identification. Instead, the EU has
finally pushed through a quota system.
There are many, many failings of this system. But what has
apparently finally broken it is the determination of hundreds of thousands of
people consistently entering the borders, in increasing numbers since the world
events unfolding from the global financial crash and the Arab Spring. This has
meant that only a few EU states are responsible for vast numbers of people, in
the very countries hit the hardest by the financial
crash and the EU's
own inequity.
Without the
infrastructure or economies to support them in Italy and Greece, hundreds of
thousands of people took hold of their futures and found ways round the system,
aiming to reach other EU states without being fingerprinted. And very often
Italy and Greece have turned a blind eye to this, in order to take the pressure
off the rest of their mountain of problems.
But what
exactly is replacing the Dublin treaties? On the same day as Merkel made her
announcement, a group of 50 Eritreans escaped from the heavily
militarised detention centre on the island of Lampedusa, and protested outside
the church in the main piazza, and remained there until the police and the
mayor convinced them to return to the centre. They were protesting against
forced fingerprinting.
This is
part of the new system which the EU is setting up in response to the border
crisis. The month of September was dominated by news of Europe's border crises
and responses to it – from the grass-roots, as well as from up above. It seemed
as if the wheels of politics were put in motion. But in truth, they were simply
being sped up, as plans which have been mooted for many months were now set in
motion.
The Times
has revealed that
the EU plans to deport thousands of migrants, through detention centres. There
can be little doubt that these centres are the 'Hotspots' being set up in Italy
and Greece, and which apparently have also been requested by Bulgaria. In the official language of the
European Commission, the 'hotspots' are centres for Migration Management Support Teams. Italy and Greece are to be host to
a regional task force (in Catania and the Piraeus docks in Athens), which will
then oversee the work carried out by a host of organisations including Frontex.
The Commission's documents make clear that the purpose of the operation is as
much deportation and closing in on smuggling networks as any concerns for the
legal reception of asylum seekers.
These
Hostpots were first mooted in June – or, as one EU Commissioner (and former
right-wing mayor of Athens) put it. “I’ve been trying for more
than five months to explain what this hotspot is.” However, the idea has taken
on a new lease of life in the context of the recent decision by a majority of
EU states (notably without many of the eastern European countries) to roll out
a quota system for the reception of 160,000 new arrivals into the EU. The quota
system is the effective end of the Dublin Agreement, which is (in theory,
still) the treaty by which people arriving into the EU must claim asylum in the
country of their first arrival. In actuality, the Dublin system has been
failing for a long time. This is not least because, in 2012, faced with the
appalling conditions of Greek reception centres, the EU allowed Greek
authorities to provide migrants with a 30-day permission to stay. The official
idea of the document was an official order to migrants telling them to go back
the way they came, although it was quite obvious that really it was a ticket to
stay in Greece either without registration, or to pass through to another
country where asylum might be claimed.
The importance of the document in Greece is that without it, it's
difficult to get a boat from one of the islands near to Turkey to mainland
Greece. For this reason, there has been an increasingly official system by
which migrants arrive on the islands, register for their 30-day document, and
then buy a ticket for a boat to Athens. The reception centres on the islands,
however, are changing. Already, Syrians are sorted into one queue, and everyone
else (mainly Afghans) sent to another. This is part of the pilot 'hotspot'
project on Lesvos. Other Frontex-run mobile offices are planned for the
islands of Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos.
The reason for separating out the Syrians from everyone else is to
identify those deemed appropriate for the EU quota scheme. The fear is that The Times article serves as advanced
warning about what will happen to everyone else. The quota system is meant to
cover those arriving in Europe between September 2015 and September 2017. Which
is to say, it is it not clear whether it applies to anyone who arrived before
that period.
Remember David Cameron's
callous deal about agreeing to help Syrian refugees in Turkey but not those already
in Calais? The EU quota
system is basically the same: it is an agreement to relocate new arrivals, but
not those already within the EU.
There is another feature contained in Cameron's announcements which
might be included in the EU approach. The British state said that they are
willing to take people for a few years, until they are able to return to their
home country – i.e. when the Syrian war is over (something now still further away with the
intervention of Russia). This would be under the Temporary
Protection system, which was mainly used during the Bosnian war. It is a
half-way house between two other measures: accepting people for individual
reasons, as proscribed under the Geneva convention, and rejecting them
altogether. Instead, Temporary Protection recognises a diffuse, generalised
problem in a country, and allows judgments to be made on a general, rather than
individual basis.
To a certain extent, this will provide immediate though temporary
assistance to those arriving in Greece or Bulgaria from Syria via Turkey, or in
Italy's case, also those suffering political
repression in Eritrea – fleeing military
conscription and forced labour.
So why were 50 Eritreans who got out of the up-and-running Hotspot on
Lampedusa, protesting against being
finger printed? The centre at Lampedusa has hardly changed, according to
accounts. The CPSA centre established there has already had the power to detain
people for up to 72 hours (and actually often for 2 weeks) after which people
are either sent directly to a deportation centre (CIE – which includes anyone
from Tunisia or Morocco), or to the Italian 'reception centres'. The difference
however is that in the old system, people were often not finger printed, either
out of an over-worked system in Lampedusa, or in other ports in Sicily to which
they were taken. Thanks to the lack of early finger printing, it has been relatively
easy for anyone not taken directly to the deportation centres to simply walk
away from the Italian reception system and make their way north to Germany.
This is what the new system attempts to change. By getting the UNHCR and
Frontex to more directly intervene in the first moments of arrival with
identification and fingerprinting, the EU is attempting to retake control of
movement throughout the EU.
The new quotas are not a benevolent system by which countries like
Germany have opened their doors, for in truth the doors (e.g. the Brenner Pass
and Ventimiglia, now heavily policed) were already usually open, and plenty of
Eritreans and Syrians have made their way to Germany via Italy and Greece.
In the new system, that journey is being made official, and under the
EU's own aegis. The reason the 50 Eritreans protested in Lampedusa the other
day is because this is not the system they have expected and educated
themselves about over the last months or years of their journey into Europe.
They would have expected to be taken to a centre in Sicily, to leave it, head
to Rome, and then to Germany, to find their friends, families, and better
economic opportunities. Instead, they are being rounded up by the EU and forced
into its own political games.
Meanwhile, the legal murkiness of the entire
system is creating, as the legal scholar Iside Gjergji has put it, a kind
of “planned chaos”, an “ambiguous
juridical and procedural space, so that the same arbitrary decisions can continue
to be imposed.” And the big question remains about what will happen to everyone
who is not Syrian or Eritrean. For if the Temporary Protection system is about
to be unrolled on a large scale, that gives no assurances for those leaving for
individual reasons, such as those seeking refuge from
persecution for their sexuality or any of the other myriad and complex
motivations which compel people to leave their homes for new destinations.
The EU has discussed the possibility of funding all
repatriations, which would chime with The
Times' revelations. Lampedusa is one of five hotspots planned for Italy,
the others being at the Pozzallo CPSA, the Trapani CIE, Augusta,
Porto Empedocle and Taranto – although of these, only Lampedusa has
actually been officially converted so far. Sicily's centres are
currently home to thousands of asylum seekers from West Africa and the Indian
subcontinent. The province of Trapani alone has around 3,000. The future of
those arriving on Italy's shores from Tunisia, Mali, Nigeria, Ghana and
Bangladesh, among other nations – having crossed not only the cemetery of the
Mediterranean, but also still more dangerous deserts and war-zones – is now
under threat even more than ever, as a direct result of the spurious
distinction between 'refugees' and 'economic migrants'. And the quota system,
relocating 120,000 people, is a mere dent on the 600,000 who have claimed
asylum this year alone, causing a backlash from some right-wing
member states.
Sicily's own reception centres, which lack supervision and are easily
open to Mafia corruption, resemble the EU's migrant operation being outsourced
to the Wild West. In one such centre the local authority has been calling every
few days since mid-September, asking if there are any Syrians or Eritreans
present. There aren't – because in general they have been known not to remain
in Italy, but move onwards to a country where there are better economic
prospects, given the high rate of their aslyum claims being accepted in the
past.
But the real question is what do the local authorities, and the EU, plan
for the rest of the centres' residents?
Additional reporting by Oscar Webb.
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