One EU policy the Tories are happy to emulate:
cracking down on refugees
Daniel
Trilling
Greece, Bulgaria and Poland have been accused of
forcibly turning away migrants – at terrible human cost
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Mon 29 May
2023 08.00 BST
If you want
to see what Rishi Sunak’s Tories hope to achieve with their “stop the boats”
policy – and the brutal reality that underlies it – look to Greece. The
country’s rightwing prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is currently riding
high, having surprised pundits with the scale of his victory over the left in
Sunday’s general election. Mitsotakis has convinced many voters that he is
returning Greece to stability after the turbulence of the 2010s – and part of
the pitch is his claim to have all but ended refugee boat crossings from
Turkey.
“We proved
that the sea has borders, and those borders can and must be guarded,” Mitsotakis
declared at a campaign event on 12 May, at which he claimed his government had
reduced “irregular” arrivals by 90%. The choice of location was significant:
Mitsotakis was speaking amid the ruins of Moria, the chaotic, filthy refugee
camp that sprang up on the Aegean island of Lesbos during Europe’s refugee
crisis, and which burned down in 2020. Today, with the government building a
new network of “closed” camps to house those who do still arrive, it appears
order has been restored.
An
investigation by the New York Times, published last week, points to what that
“order” can mean in practice. Video footage, shot by an aid worker and verified
by the NYT, shows a group of refugees from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia being
taken from Lesbos and abandoned at sea by the Greek authorities. First, the 12
men, women and children are taken from an unmarked van and forced on to a
waiting speedboat. From there, they are transferred on to a Greek coastguard
vessel and taken out into the Aegean, where they are pushed on to an inflatable
emergency life raft – an easily capsized and unsteerable vessel – and left to
drift. The group were later rescued and taken to Turkey.
The video
appears to show a particularly extreme version of what is known as a pushback:
the forcible turning away of migrants at a country’s border. If so, it likely
breaks Greek, EU and international law. Aside from the immediate danger they
might put people in, pushbacks violate a fundamental principle of refugee
protection, which is that people seeking asylum have the right to a fair
hearing. When confronted with the evidence on CNN this week, Mitsotakis called
the incident “completely unacceptable” and claimed an investigation had already
begun. But it is part of a wider pattern: there have been numerous reports of
Greece abandoning refugees at sea, although the evidence has rarely been so
stark.
In recent
years, countries on the EU’s southern and eastern borders have been taking
increasingly harsh measures to deter refugees. Bulgaria and Poland are among
other countries accused of violently pushing back people at their borders.
Migrants who stay in Europe are more likely to find themselves in
detention-like conditions – there are already reports of problems at the new
Greek camps – while those who step in to help find themselves harassed by
border guards and threatened with prosecution. In Italy, 21 sea rescuers,
including crew members of the rescue ship Iuventa, are currently charged with
“facilitating illegal immigration” and face years in prison if found guilty.
Allegations
of mistreatment are often met with official denial – in 2021, when a Dutch
journalist accused Mitsotakis of “lying” about alleged pushbacks, he responded
by accusing her of insulting the Greek people – and little sanction from the
EU. Indeed, it was alleged last year that the EU’s border agency Frontex had
taken part in pushbacks in the Aegean and then covered it up. (The agency
denied this.)
The lack of
complaint should come as little surprise. Europe has come to see a shared
interest in limiting the movement of refugees across its borders, even if that
places people in danger and erodes the universal right to asylum. In 2020, in
response to a border crisis deliberately stoked by Turkey, the president of the
European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, described Greece as Europe’s
“shield”.
While the
EU has until now largely turned a blind eye to reports of wrongdoing at its
frontiers, as a bloc it has also found ways to force refugees back to danger
while staying just within the bounds of its own human rights laws. In the
central Mediterranean, the EU has overseen the return of more than 100,000
migrants to Libya since 2017, where they risk being severely abused, by
withdrawing search and rescue and sending coordinates of boats in distress to
the Libyan coastguard – a system of pushbacks in all but name.
This is one
area in which post-Brexit Britain is happy to emulate its European neighbours.
The UK government’s crackdown on small boat crossings is partly inspired by
Greece’s model. The former home secretary Priti Patel, who toured Greece’s new
“closed” centres for migrants in summer 2021, wanted Border Force officers to
carry out “turnback” operations in the Channel and gave them immunity from
prosecution for any deaths at sea. The illegal migration bill currently making
its way through parliament envisages a network of camps on former military
sites, much like the ones the Greek government is building.
Advocates
of these policies say they are necessary to maintain a sense of control over
migration and that they save lives, by reducing the overall number of people
making journeys. The Tories are no doubt looking enviously at Mitsotakis’s vote
share: the pushback revelations are unlikely to make a dent in his support when
Greeks go back to the polls next month. But turning refugees away does not
reduce the number of people who need safety, it merely pushes them towards
poorer countries, who already host 85% of the world’s displaced people. That
increases the likelihood that some will turn to smugglers or take greater risk
to travel, and gives countries further back along the migration routes an
incentive to close their borders too.
International
refugee law exists for a reason: if people don’t have the right to asylum
wherever they need it, we quickly reach a situation in which they can’t find it
anywhere. The alternative to the current hardening of borders is for states to
run well-funded, fair asylum systems – and to support one another in doing so.
That’s not easy to argue for in the current political climate, but a first step
is to expose the human cost of our governments’ existing policies.
In Greece,
Médecins Sans Frontières says that in the past year, 940 refugees it was in
contact with have gone missing from Lesbos alone: the EU must hold the people
responsible accountable. In the UK, the Refugee Council estimates that as many
as 190,000 people could end up detained or forced into destitution by the illegal
migration bill, which does more to undermine asylum than any other law to date.
If you are
unhappy with what is going on, now is the time to make a noise about it.
Daniel
Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders
of Europe
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