Humanizing refugee policy

Improving policy on refugees
Improving policy for asylum-seekers

Context

People are suffocating to death hiding in ships on their way to Europe and drowning in European waters in an attempt to escape persecution in their country of origin. The majority of those who survive are deported. The UNITED Refugees Campaign has documented 338 refugee deaths in Western Europe since January 1993.

Implementation

In 1999, the European Council made provisions for a European asylum system. All demands for asylum would be examined according to a common procedure, under which those running the risk of persecution at home would not be sent back. European standards would assure the refugees of decent treatment on arrival, and the same status in the event their demand was accepted.

Claim

Western Europe has fundamentally unjust asylum policies which produce terrible consequences, including inhuman detention conditions, the institutional criminalization of asylum-seekers and the effect this has on stimulating popular racism and xenophobia, the accountability of Western arms dealers in allowing for the creation of refugees, and governmental responsibility in the creation of economic migrants.

There is no immigration policy in Western Europe. Nothing that deserves the name. It is in the context of this regrettable absence of policy that refugees' rights are so much an issue and so abused. Virtually all legal options of entering Western Europe have been removed. The mechanisms turn asylum-seekers into illegal immigrants by making it impossible to travel legally. This stigmatizes and incriminates them at the same time. Then politicians can label asylum-seekers as "criminals, illegal immigrants, bogus, scroungers and terrorists'. The media take up and amplify political racism and the civil and judicial authorities absorb and reflect the attitude of suspicion, disbelief and hostility.