By Baher Kamal*
“At a time when the people of the UK have opened their hearts and homes to Ukrainians, the government is choosing to act with cruelty and rip up their obligations to others fleeing war and persecution” says HRW report. Credit: UNOHCR
MADRID, Apr 21 2022 (IPS) – In what looks pretty much like an ‘operation clean sweep’ aiming at getting rid of more and more migrants, refugees and asylum seekers by shipping them far away, the process of ‘externalisation’ of millions of victims of wars, poverty, climate crisis and political persecution, is now growing fast
In fact, in a short period of time, reports by major human rights organisations have revealed how the US and Europe, in addition to Australia, are increasingly sending migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to other countries, regardless of their human rights records.
“They then turn the migrants over to masked men, who force them onto small boats, take them to the middle of the Evros River, and force them into the frigid water, making them wade to the riverbank on the Turkish side. None are apparently being properly registered in Greece or allowed to lodge asylum claims.”
Take the case, for example, of the United Kingdom, which plans to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda, a proceeding that Human Rights Watch (HRW) has classified as a “cruelty itself.”
In a report by Yasmine Ahmed and Emilie McDonnell, the two human rights defenders said that shirking its obligations to persons seeking asylum at its shores, the UK government has on 14 April 2022 signed an agreement with Rwanda to send asylum seekers crossing the English Channel there.
“Under the new Asylum Partnership Arrangement, people arriving in the UK irregularly or who arrived irregularly since January 1, 2022 may be sent to Rwanda on a one-way ticket to have their asylum claim processed and, if recognized as refugees, to be granted refugee status there.”
Victims of ‘their’ wars
It should be noted that many of the shipped migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are victims of long wars launched by US-led coalitions with the intensive participation of the United Kingdom’s military forces.
Such is the case, for example, of the war in Afghanistan (which lasted 20 years); in Iraq and in Libya, let alone Syria (now entering its tewlveth year), and the huge Western weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to fuel their continued bombing on Yemen (so far for over seven years).
Cruel, ineffective and likely unlawful
The Human Rights Watch report said that the UK is arguing that offshoring asylum seekers to Rwanda complies with its international legal obligations.
“However, offshore processing is not only cruel and ineffective, but also very likely to be unlawful,” add Yasmine Ahmed and Emilie McDonnell.
“It creates a two-tiered refugee system that discriminates against one group based on their mode of arrival, despite refugee status being grounded solely on the threat of persecution or serious harm and international standards recognizing that asylum seekers are often compelled to cross borders irregularly to seek protection.”
UN “firmly” opposed
The deal reportedly made by the United Kingdom to send some migrants for processing and relocation to the Central African nation of Rwanda, are at odds with States’ responsibility to take care of those in need of protection, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on 14 April 2022.
In an initial response, UNHCR spelled out that it was not a party to negotiations that have taken place between London and Kigali, which it is understood were part of an economic development partnership.
According to news reports, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has said the scheme costing around $160 million, would “save countless lives” from human trafficking, and the often treacherous water crossing between southern England and the French coast, known as the English Channel, UNHCR explained.
“UNHCR remains firmly opposed to arrangements that seek to transfer refugees and asylum seekers to third countries in the absence of sufficient safeguards and standards,” said UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Gillian Triggs.
Triggs described the arrangements as shifting asylum responsibilities and evading international obligations that are “contrary to the letter and spirit of the Refugee Convention.”
Rwanda’s “appalling human rights record”
Furthermore, Rwanda’s appalling human rights record is well documented, the two human rights activists went on. In 2018, Rwandan security forces shot dead at least 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo when they protested a cut to food rations.
Extrajudicial killings
According to the Human Rights Watch’s report ”Rwanda has a known track record of extrajudicial killings, suspicious deaths in custody, unlawful or arbitrary detention, torture, and abusive prosecutions, particularly targeting critics and dissidents.”
In fact, the UK directly raised its concerns about respect for human rights with Rwanda, and grants asylum to Rwandans who have fled the country, including four just last year.
“At a time when the people of the UK have opened their hearts and homes to Ukrainians, the government is choosing to act with cruelty and rip up their obligations to others fleeing war and persecution.”
Greece: Migrants stripped, robbed, and forced to Turkey
Just one week earlier, Human Rights Watch on 7 April 2022 reported from Athens that Greek security forces are employing third country nationals, men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, to push asylum seekers back at the Greece-Turkey land border.
The 29-page report “Their Faces Were Covered’: Greece’s Use of Migrants as Police Auxiliaries in Pushbacks,” found that Greek police are detaining asylum seekers at the Greece-Turkey land border at the Evros River, in many cases stripping them of most of their clothing and stealing their money, phones, and other possessions.
“They then turn the migrants over to masked men, who force them onto small boats, take them to the middle of the Evros River, and force them into the frigid water, making them wade to the riverbank on the Turkish side. None are apparently being properly registered in Greece or allowed to lodge asylum claims.”
There can be no denying that the Greek government is responsible for the illegal pushbacks at its borders, and using proxies to carry out these illegal acts does not relieve it of any liability, said Bill Frelick, refugee and migrant rights director at Human Rights Watch.
“The European Commission should urgently open legal proceedings and hold the Greek government accountable for violating EU laws prohibiting collective expulsions.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 26 Afghan migrants and asylum seekers, 23 of whom were pushed back from Greece to Turkey across the Evros River between September 2021 and February 2022.
The 23 men, 2 women, and a boy said they were detained by men they believed to be Greek authorities, usually for no more than 24 hours with little to no food or drinking water, and pushed back to Turkey.
“The men and boy provided first hand victim or witness accounts of Greek police or men they believed to be Greek police beating or otherwise abusing them.”
Greece uses of migrants as police auxiliaries in pushbacks
Sixteen of those interviewed by Human Rights Watch said the boats taking them back to Turkey were piloted by men who spoke Arabic or the South Asian languages common among migrants.
“They said most of these men wore black or commando-like uniforms and used balaclavas to cover their faces. Three people interviewed were able to talk with the men ferrying the boats. The boat pilots told them they were also migrants who were employed by the Greek police with promises of being provided with documents enabling them to travel onward.”
Pushbacks violate multiple human rights norms, including the prohibition of collective expulsion under the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to due process in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to seek asylum under EU asylum law and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the principle of non refoulement under the 1951 Refugee Convention, Human Rights Watch noted.
Some are more “real refugees” than others
On March 1, Greece’s migration minister, Notis Mitarachi, declared before the Hellenic Parliament that Ukrainians were the “real refugees,” implying that those on Greece’s border with Turkey are not.
Reacting to this, Bill Frelick, refugee and migrant rights director at Human Rights Watch, said that at a time when Greece welcomes Ukrainians as ‘real refugees,’ it conducts cruel pushbacks on Afghans and others fleeing similar war and violence.
“The double standard makes a mockery of the purported shared European values of equality, rule of law, and human dignity.” (To be continued).
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Europe Sweeps Away More Refugees, Asylum Seekers – Part II: Hungary, Poland
MADRID, Apr 22 2022 (IPS) – Part I of this two-part series focused on the cases of the United Kingdom and Greece. This article will deal with how Hungary has been criminalising organisations that provide humanitarian assistance to migrants, and how Poland ‘arbitrarily’ detains thousands of asylum seekers.
In fact, Hungary, a European Union full member country, has a long record of ‘demonising’ migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Already back in 2018, another major human rights organisation –Human Rights Watch, reported that, since 2015, the Viktor Orban government has engaged in a virulent campaign against migrants and asylum seekers, including efforts to demonise organisations that provide legal and humanitarian assistance to these groups.
In the case of another European Union’s full member country –Poland, another major human rights organisation Amnesty International, on 11 April 2022 reported that the Polish authorities have arbitrarily detained nearly two thousand asylum-seekers who crossed into the country from Belarus in 2021 [that’s prior to the Ukrainian war].
Also that many of those asylum seekers have been subjected to abuse, including strip searches in unsanitary, overcrowded facilities, and in some cases even forcible sedation and tasering.
Degrading treatment
Amnesty International reported about the Polish Authorities violating the rights of asylum-seekers, including strip searches and other degrading treatment, in overcrowded detention centres. Some people were forcibly sedated during their return.
“At the Polish border, they face razor wire fences and repeated pushbacks by border guards sometimes up to 20-30 times.”
Asylum-seekers who crossed the Belarus border into Poland, including many forced to do so by Belarusian Border Guards, are now detained in “filthy, overcrowded detention centres where guards subject them to abusive treatment and deny them contact with the outside world,” said Jelena Sesar, Regional Researcher at Amnesty International.
Arbitrary detention, abysmal detention conditions
Polish border guards have systematically rounded up and violently pushed back people crossing from Belarus, sometimes threatening them with guns, according to Amnesty International’s report.
“The vast majority of those who have been fortunate enough to avoid being pushed back to Belarus and to apply for asylum in Poland are forced into automatic detention, without a proper assessment of their individual situation and the impact detention would have on their physical and mental health.”
Suicidal thoughts
“They are often held for prolonged and indefinite periods of time in overcrowded centres that offer little privacy and only limited access to sanitary facilities, doctors, psychologists, or legal assistance.”
Almost all of the people Amnesty International interviewed said they were traumatised after fleeing areas of conflict and being trapped for months on the Belarusian-Polish border.
They also suffered from serious psychological problems, including anxiety, insomnia, depression and frequent suicidal thoughts, undoubtedly exacerbated by their unnecessary metres. For most, psychological support was unavailable.
Retraumatised inside a military base
Many of the people who Amnesty spoke to had been in Wędrzyn detention centre, which holds up to 600 people. Overcrowding is particularly acute in this facility, where up to 24 men are detained in rooms measuring just eight square metres, Amnesty International reported.
“In 2021, the Polish authorities decreased the minimum required space for foreign detainees from three square metres per person to just two. The Council of Europe minimum standard for personal living space in prisons and detention centres is four square metres per person.”
European Guantánamo
People held in Wędrzyn recounted how guards greeted new detainees by saying “welcome to Guantánamo”, reports Amnesty International, adding that many of them were victims of torture in their home countries before enduring harrowing experiences both in Belarus and on the border of Poland.
The detention centre in Wędrzyn is part of an active military base. The facility’s barbed-wire walls — and the persistent sound of armoured vehicles, helicopters and gunfire from military exercises in the area — only serve to re-traumatise them.
Deshumanised
“Most days we were woken up by the sounds of tanks and helicopters, followed by gunshots and explosions. This would go on all day, sometimes. When you have nowhere to go, no activities [to] take your mind off it or a space for even a brief respite, this is intolerable,” Khafiz, a Syrian refugee, told Amnesty International.
“After all the torture in prison in Syria, threats to my family, and then months on the road, I think I was finally broken in Wędrzyn.”
The human rights defender organisation also reported that, in Lesznowola Detention Centre, detainees said that guards’ treatment left them feeling dehumanised.
Nearly all those interviewed reported consistently disrespectful and verbally abusive behaviour, racist remarks and other practices that indicated psychological ill-treatment.
Men who Amnesty International interviewed uniformly complained about the manner in which body searches were conducted. When people were transferred from one detention centre to another, they were forced to undergo a strip search at each facility, even though they were in state custody at all times.
Violent forcible returns
Amnesty International interviewed several people who were forcibly returned as well as some who avoided return and remain in detention in Poland.
Many said the Polish border guards who conducted the returns coerced them into signing documents in Polish that they suspected included incriminating information in order to justify their returns.
They also said that, in some cases, border guards used excessive force, such as tasers, restrained people with handcuffs, and even sedated those being returned.
Authorities attempted to forcibly return Yezda, a 30-year old Kurdish woman, with her husband and three small children, says Amnesty International. “After being told that the family would be returned to Iraq, Yezda panicked and screamed and pleaded with the guards not to take them.”
“I was ready to die in Poland”
She threatened to take her life and became extremely agitated. “I knew I could not go back to Iraq and I was ready to die in Poland. While I was crying like that, two guards restrained me and my husband, tied our hands behind our backs, and a doctor gave us an injection that made us very weak and sleepy.”
Yezda said that she broke her foot as she fought the guards who tried to put her on the plane. Yezda and her family were returned to Warsaw after the airline refused to take them to Iraq. They remain in a camp in Poland for now.
Volunteers and activists have been barred from accessing the border of Poland and Belarus, and some have even faced prosecution for trying to help people cross the border, added Amnesty International.
Stranded
“Hundreds of people fleeing conflict in the Middle East and other parts of the world remain stranded on the border between Belarus and Poland. The Polish government must immediately stop push backs. They are illegal no matter how the government tries to justify them.”
Cruelty at Europe’s other borders
In its report: Poland: Cruelty not compassion, at Europe’s other borders, Amnesty International explained that the rapid relief effort at the border, exceptional generosity of civil society and willingness of Polish authorities to receive people fleeing from Ukraine contrast starkly with the Polish government’s hostility toward refugees and migrants who have arrived in the country via Belarus since July 2021.
“Hundreds of people who crossed from Belarus have been arbitrarily detained in Poland in appalling conditions and without access to a fair asylum proceeding. Many have been forcibly returned to their countries of origin, some under sedation. In addition, hundreds of people remain stranded inside Belarus and face increasingly desperate conditions.”
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*Baher Kamal is an Egyptian-born, Spanish national, secular journalist, publisher and editor of Human Wrongs Watch with nearli five decades of professional experience — from reporter to special envoy to chief editor of national dailies and an international news agency. He is former Senior Advisor to the Director general of IPS. He is also member of TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and of Other News.