A ruling from the National Court has ordered the Government to grant asylum to Basir (not his real name), a Sudanese refugee, who began his immigration process at just 15 years old to leave behind persecutions for religious reasons and the armed conflict that his country is going through.
The Administrative Litigation Chamber issued an order on February 29 favorably resolving the requested precautionary measure, which obliges the Administration to carry out “the appropriate actions in order to promote the transfer of the asylum seeker to Spain.” However, the transfer has still not taken place and the young man, 25 years old, has continued sleeping on the streets of Morocco since June 24, 2022, when he tried to jump the Melilla fence, along with more than 1,500 migrants.
Given the still non-existent transfer, the DEMOS legal team, which is handling Basir’s case, filed a petition with the Chamber to order the Administration to “immediately comply” with the resolution. In addition to two other petitions to the National Court. Despite the efforts, “they have continued to fail to comply with the judicial resolution.”
“That the Government ignores this resolution is further demonstration that there are no effective means of access to the right of asylum for black African people, as Minister Grande-Marlaska has stated in the Congress of Deputies and in the European Parliament,” express Arsenio G. Cores and Adilia de las Mercedes, the young man’s lawyers. And the lawyer adds, in conversations with La Vanguardia: “Safe routes not only do not exist, but they do not even exist even when the administrations dictate them.”
DEMOS points to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as “ultimately responsible” for resolving Basir’s request through the Spanish Embassy in Morocco. “The institutional racism of the Government has reached such a point that it is allowed to ignore resolutions of a Court in charge of controlling the actions of the Administration that violate human rights.”
For their part, Foreign Affairs sources have told La Vanguardia that due to data protection they cannot report on the file, but, in turn, they have assured that the Moroccan embassy is “in permanent contact with the interested party.”
At the same time, the Ministry of the Interior has detailed that all international protection procedures begin the moment the citizen arrives in Spain. The Office of Asylum and Refuge (OAR)—responsible for the Interior—is responsible for processing, managing and instructing these requests. Furthermore, he has admitted that the reason why Basir is not in Spain exceeds his powers.
Basir has been searching for that protection for more than a year. Specifically, on December 13, 2022, he requested at the Spanish Embassy in Rabat to be transferred to Spanish territory to later be able to request international protection, under article 38 of the Asylum Law. After six months, his request was not resolved and suffering and desperation led him to write a letter to Pedro Sánchez. “Is it my skin color that prevents me from receiving the same treatment as people from Ukraine and other countries?” the young man asks the President of the Government.
Without a safe haven since she was born, in the South Kordofan region, and without family, after being murdered before her eyes, Basir continues looking for that place where she can take advantage of the opportunities that she was never allowed to have. Her religious beliefs served as an excuse for her uncles to subject him to atrocious violence and persecution with the aim of converting him to Islam. And as a minor, he left his country and went through Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Morocco, countries in which he continued to encounter the violence from which he always wanted to escape. The Melilla fence was his last stop on this migratory journey where he was beaten and tied up—he claims—as if he were a criminal by both the Moroccan and Spanish border guards.
“With each passing day, the Government keeps a citizen who has already suffered it exposed to torture, and fails to comply with the UN convention against it to prevent it,” warns Adilia de las Mercedes.
The resolution of the National Court can be appealed, but Basir’s lawyer recalls that “its execution is immediate” and “the action is not paralyzed, even if an appeal is filed.”
