[P2P-F] Fwd: Europe’s quiet offensive against people helping refugees

Wed Nov 1 11:47:34 CET 2017

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Barat <russelltribunaluk at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 9:02 PM
Subject: Europe’s quiet offensive against people helping refugees
To: Frank Barat RToP <RussellTribunalUK at gmail.com>

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/
europes-quiet-offensive-against-people-helping-refugees/

Three years ago today (31 October), EU pressure on Italy forced the end of
one the EU’s most successful humanitarian mission, ‘Mare Nostrum’, a
search-and-rescue operation that in just one year brought 130,000 refugees
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/20/italy-ran-an-operation-that-save-thousands-of-migrants-from-drowning-in-the-mediterranean-why-did-it-stop/>
safely
to Europe’s shores. Ben Hayes and Frank Barat look back on three years
since the end of Operation Mare Nostrum.

*Frank Barat is coordinator of the War and Pacification program at the
Transnational Institute. He has edited several books, the latest being
Freedom is a Constant Struggle with Angela Davis. Ben Hayes is a fellow of
the Transnational Institute <https://www.tni.org/en/bio/ben-hayes> and
an independent researcher. <https://about.me/ben.hayes>*

As the death toll mounted in the wake of this decision, including 1,200
victims <https://blamingtherescuers.org/> at sea five months later,
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) stepped into the breach, launching
their own rescue missions in a desperate attempt to save lives. Their
efforts were part of a wave of compassion across Europe that year
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/21-beautiful-moments-of-humanity-from-the-ongoing-refugee-cr>,
as people organised convoys to refugee reception centers, warmly greeted
arrivals at German train stations and lined highways to provide food and
water to those making the arduous trek from war-torn regions of Syria and
elsewhere.

As European politicians retreated from their humanitarian obligations, its
citizens demonstrated Europe’s tradition of compassion, solidarity and
commitment to the Geneva Conventions.

In his first State of the Union address
<http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5614_en.htm>, EU Commission
President Juncker had even praised the volunteers as representative of the
kind of “Europe I want to live in”. Yet just a few short years later, the
Union looks very different, and Juncker is silent as those very same
activists are now being treated as criminals rather than heroes.

To cite just a few recent cases, in February 2017, a French shepherd,
Cedric Herrou, from the Roya Valley, was condemned to an eight-month
suspended prison sentence and a €3,000 fine for providing shelter to
homeless migrants. In Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen was fined in 2016
for opening her house to refugee families with nowhere to live. In February
2017, on the border between Greece and Macedonia more than 60 volunteers
from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, the UK, and the
Czech Republic were subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation
by armed police, including threats of arrest and arbitrary house searches
<http://www.omct.org/human-rights-defenders/urgent-interventions/greece/2016/04/d23733/#_ftn4>.
These cases are the tip of a particularly unpleasant iceberg that should
shame Europe’s leaders.

It is important to stress that these cases are both a product and violation
of EU law. The 2002 Directive on the facilitation of illegal entry and
residence, which is aimed at organised people traffickers, contains a
non-binding humanitarian exemption that is supposed to ensure that such
activities are excluded from its scope. Fifteen years later, however,
two-thirds of EU member states now apply the law but not the exemption, paving
the way
<http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0036>for
the widespread criminalisation of refugee solidarity and activism. These
laws are supplemented by a raft of administrative procedures that hinder
NGO operations or further restrict the scope for refugee assistance. The
Netherlands requires people to report undocumented migrants. Cyprus forbids
refugee groups from working with pro bono lawyers. Croatia moved recently
to criminalise the feeding of ‘illegal’ migrants.

This attack on human rights defenders and flagrant disregard for the EU’s
international humanitarian law and human rights obligations is not an
aberration but a product of EU policy and practice. The EU’s Border and
Coastguard Agency (ECBG, formally known as Frontex) is guilty of smearing
NGO search-and-rescue boats by implying their collusion with traffickers
and smugglers, despite an Italian Senate Committee enquiry of April this
year finding no evidence no such links. These smears prefaced a wider
attack on those NGOs operating in the Mediterranean by an unholy alliance
of state agencies and far right activists.

Search-and-rescue missions, conducted by household names like *Medicins
Sans Frontieres* and *Save the Children* as well as new organisations that
emerged in response to the humanitarian crisis, have been relentlessly
targeted. In Greece, three Spanish firemen, on a rescue mission for the
*Proem-Aid*association, were arrested at sea and detained for 60 hours
before being bailed on charges of human trafficking. In Italy, undercover
intelligence agents have infiltrated NGOs and operated covertly on
search-and-rescue boats. Several vessels have been now been seized pending
further investigations. Coupled with a ‘voluntary’ Code of Conduct which
all but ended the capacity for the NGOs to operate independently, these
actions have had the desired effect of stopping the rescue missions
altogether.

The manufactured narrative around NGOs and trafficking has also been seized
upon by populists and fascists, such as the crowd-funded ‘Defend Europe’
boat launched in July with the aim of actively disrupting the humanitarian
NGOs. While they abandoned their mission because of disruption by
antifascists, they were to claim success by arguing that that the Italian
and Libyan governments had done the job for them: “Only two months ago,
many NGOs sailed in front of the Libyan coasts, like cabs waiting for
customers. Today, there is only one.” The unleashing of these forces has
led to much wider attacks on Italian NGOs that are reminiscent of the
scapegoating and demonisation of George Soros
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/george-soros-upset-by-anti-semitic-campaign-against-him-in-hungary>
in
Hungary.

The criminalisation of refugee solidarity is the latest salvo in an EU
policy long predicated on stopping refugees reaching in EU states at any
cost, be that by letting them drown, confining them to camps in Turkey, or
paying brutal Libyan militiamen to  prevent their departure. The targeting
of activists who oppose these policies and want to live in the same kind of
Europe as Jean-Claude Juncker is about removing witnesses to what is
happening and dissuading other European citizens that more humane policies
are possible. This dismembering of Europe’s values and principles has
turned the Mediterranean into a mass grave in the name of creating a
‘deterrent’ effect.

Three years ago, Europe’s citizens stepped in where its leaders failed –
showing the compassion and solidarity upon which the EU is founded. It is
time for Europe’s politicians to show the same courage and end a
duplicitous policy capable only of piling misery of some of the world’s
most vulnerable people.

*The Transnational Institute will explore these issues further in a
forthcoming paper on criminalisation of solidarity with refugees.*

*"Freedom is a constant struggle"*
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