Facial recognitions. Retention of children from the age of six. Arrests of people who, although they are within European borders, are suspected of having entered irregularly. Border externalization. Carte blanche to act outside the law in the face of a “massive influx” of migrants. These are the points that arouse the most criticism of the Migration and Asylum Pact, approved yesterday by the European Parliament, among NGOs specialized in this field.
“The message conveyed by the migration pact is that migration is a problem, a danger, and that, therefore, more control and surveillance mechanisms must be established. Instead of addressing it as a humanitarian problem of responsibility with human rights,” denounces the director of Policies and Campaigns of CEAR (Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance), Mauricio Valiente. This is what the extreme right proposes: “More walls and more difficulties” to access Europe, he continues. “And when the most xenophobic positions are right, instead of taking away their breeding ground, what it does is strengthen them,” he says.
In this sense, Bárbara B. [asks that her last name not appear for security reasons], press officer of No Name Kitchen, also speaks to this newspaper: “When you show society that so much vigilance is needed and so many obstacles are put in place, When it comes to asking for international protection against people who migrate, as if they were criminals, you are promoting racism.” A vision that is not shared by the Commissioner for the Interior, Ylva Johansson, who believes that the legislative package, which has generated intense disputes between the Member States during the four years of its negotiation, removes arguments from the forces of this ideology, which politically instrumentalize this question.
Both CEAR, No Name Kitchen, Save the Children, Amnesty International and a large number of international NGOs denounce that the pact represents an “unprecedented setback” in terms of the right to asylum and the protection of human rights. They give as an example the introduction of screening, which means that people who try to enter or have already entered the territory of the European Union will have to be detained and undergo identity, health and security screening. This will include fingerprinting or facial recognition, including children as young as six years of age. In this way, Eurodac (the EU database on asylum seekers) will become – says Bárbara B. – “a weapon of mass surveillance.” Brussels highlights that “authorities will be able to record whether someone could present a threat to security, whether the person is violent or armed.”
Screening will also allow “accelerating the returns of asylum seekers,” adds Valiente. That is, making hot returns, which are the expulsions from the country of an asylum seeker trying to cross the border, legal. These practices are seen every day by No Name Kitchen volunteers who work near the borders, in Bosnia, Italy, Greece or the city of Ceuta, among other places.
Another measure promoted by the reform is the outsourcing of migration management to countries neighboring the EU. Serbia, for example, signed agreements with Hungary and Austria in November. “Every time there is a new agreement with a third country to ‘protect’ the border, which is normally how the European Union defines it, we know that in practice it translates into more violence,” says Bárbara B., whose NGO continually records cases of torture and attacks at the borders.
The “daily drama of migration on our borders is going to continue,” says Valiente, “because it has been shown that these measures that make population movements more difficult, make them more risky and cause more deaths, but they do not eliminate the causes that make people migrate. people in their countries of origin: conflicts, persecution, inequality…”
