“THE SMALLER THE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION OF OPINION , THE MORE VIOLENT IS THE GOVERNMENT IN THAT PLACE… AMSTERDAM FOR EXAMPLE HAS THE BENEFITS OF THIS FREEDOM THAT ALL NATIONS ADMIRE. IN THIS CITY PEOPLE FROM ALL NATIONS AND WITH ALL POSSIBLE BELIEFS LIVE TOGETHER IN HARMONY…”[1]
With this quote the Spanish-Portuguese Sephardic Dutch political philosopher, Spinoza described the city of Amsterdam. Spinoza admired the Dutch freedom of thinking and freedom of religion, writing that freedom is the most precious thing. It is important to remember how throughout the centuries, countries and cities like Amsterdam have been a shelter and home of people running away from countries and places where at that time they were unfree. Running away from religious, ethnic, or political persecution.
Many people through the centuries had been looking for a place where they could live in peace, where they could be free.
Today we could still say that the Netherlands, that Europe, is a place where people come looking for shelter, for freedom, for peace. Looking for a place where they can have hope to build up their lives – an option which war and terrorism have made impossible in their home countries. This is the story of Mohammed, a Syrian Doctor who came to the Netherlands seeking shelter for he and his family. We met Mohamed last summer when we went to visit an Asylum Center in Leiden. When we arrived in his room, he was doing his Dutch homework, and when I told him that I was Spanish, his first question was, “Do you know Spinoza, the Spanish Sephardic Jew who was a political philosopher?” He was so enthusiastic because he had visited Spinosa’s house in Leiden and he had even gone to the public library to photocopy the biography of Spinoza.
When we asked him why he left Syria, he told us that he ran away from ISIS, from Islamic extremism, he ran away from religious and political intolerance.
When we asked him why he came to the Netherlands, he mentioned the Protestant reformers, Calvin and Luther. He came to the Netherlands because he wanted to live with freedom – because he wanted his children to grow up in a country where they could be free. Mohamed reminded us that he is a refugee who came here looking for freedom. He came here because he admires Europe, the respect of human rights and European Christian heritage. He breaks all the stereotypes that we have about refugees coming from Islamic countries. There are other refugees like him though they may not represent the mentality of the majority. We listen only to media and political narratives that reinforce fear.
When we listen to Mohamed, we feel a little bit afraid that he is going to be disappointed very soon. Europe had begun to question whether we really believe in human rights and freedom for everyone. It looks like we still believe in them, but only for us, the refugees have the right to be forgotten. European citizens have begun to believe that “Europe is only for Europeans”. “The right to have rights”: From the Refugee Convention to the EU policies
The constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents. (….) The very phrase ‘human rights’ became for all concerned — victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike — the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.[2]
The Refugee Convention (1951) was drafted to protect the European refugees after World War II, and later expanded to provide protection to people fleeing persecution around the world. The Treaty setting out obligations to refugees is the 1951 Convention and the Protection of Refugees is the 1967 protocol; together they define who refugees are and set out the rights of refugees. The main goal is to ensure than when a state fails or turns against its own citizens, the people would have a place to go until they could return home.
The Refugee Convention created a good definition and principles however, it has become increasingly marginal to the way in which refugee protection happens around the world. For example, 65 years ago the intention of the Refugee convention was to integrated the refugees in the local economic system in a way that refugees could provide for their own needs. Nowadays, most of the refugees do not have freedom of movement and are not allowed to live independent lives. Most of them do not enjoy the freedom of movement which they are entitled to under international law. Freedom of movement is the key fundamental right, because without freedom of movement it is difficult to have access to the other rights, like education, employment, legal access, identity papers….This right is the cornerstone of the other rights. In her essay, We, the Refugees, Hannah Arendt says: “Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused”[3].
It is a paradox that the UNHCR runs most of the refugee camps when originally these camps were only for emergency situations. In this way refugees become burdens on their host countries and international community.
Nowadays when the refugees arrive in Europe, we stop them at the border….so they can not exercise the freedom of movement anymore. We stop them in Greece, in the Balkans…and after the Turkey-EU deal we went one step further: around 54.000 refugees and migrants who were in Greece looking to go to Europe, were sent to a detention asylum center.
In 2016, almost half of the world’s refugees live in refugee camps where they cannot experience freedom of movement or in some cases only in a very limited way.
Throughout history there have always been forced, economic, and political migrations….It is not new that people lose their home – but the new situation is that now many people can not find a new home. In this refugee crisis, we have a collective responsibility for those who can not go back to the country where they came from, we have a responsibility for those who suffer. Therefore women children and sick people should have priority.
The paradox of the system is it recognizes that the refugees have a right to seek asylum but in practice the immigration policies blocks the way to safety. It is a system which forces people into a limbo of waiting forever. According to the convention, refugees are a global and shared responsibility but the reality is that the countries bordering the conflict zones take the majority of the refugees. In the case of Europe, according to the Dublin Regulation, refugees should stay in the first country where they enter the EU, in this case the Mediterranean countries, as they are the neighbors and gatekeepers of the Middle East and Africa. It should not be necessary to connect the place where a refugee arrives for the first time and the state in which will look for protection because this system had put most of the responsibility on neighbour countries regardless of their economic and social capacity.
The paradox of EU policies
The reality is that Europe would give visas to almost no one of the countries where the refugees come from. In a world that does not create a safe legal route, the only way the refugees could come it is to use the service of the smugglers.
This is the story that Amir told me about he and his family coming from to Europe and how their lost a child crossing the border and how they got papers to be asylum seekers. Amir was a businessman in Aleppo who went to study IT in France for two years when he was young. When the war started he had two computer shops in Aleppo. One was destroyed by a bomb in 2013, the second one was stolen by ISIS. However he and his family stayed in Aleppo, they wanted to stay – it had been their city for generations. Their children’s school was bombed in 2014 and 2015. The last time the school was bombed some school kids died so they decide to pack and leave Syria. They did not have enough money to pay the smugglers passage from Turkey to Lesbos; they have three children and it was too cold to cross with them. So they choose the land route, more dangerous because there had been always a strict patrol control on both the Turkish and the Greek side. So they went with a smuggler and a group of people by night, so nobody will see them. They have to walk for more than two days along the railway next to the river. On the second night one short train came very quick and very close to them, so their six-year old girl, Aya, fainted and passed away. The train driver noticed something happened and the smuggler was afraid so he run away with the rest of the group. Amir wait with his family till the driver came and helped them to go to a little Greek village on the border where the police officer and his family took them to their home, The next day the police officer made a call to Athens; an UNHCR delegate came and sped up the process for them so in two weeks they could apply for asylum in France.
They lost a daughter but once they were in Europe, the process of application for legal papers was very quick. Therefore the main problem is the paradox of a system that does not create a safe legal route but still recognizes the right of the refugees when they are in the front door of Europe, regardless if they came with the smugglers or almost died on the way. We criticized the human smugglers but we still allow them to be the only viable route to look for a asylum in Europe.
Crossing the borders (2015-2016)
In 2015, Europe did not have a plan and could not coordinate a response to the refugee influx. In 2016, Europe realized that refugees could complicate the reaction of public opinion and political leaders started to be afraid that the arrival of refugees could contribute to the increase of xenophobic feelings and the populist parties.
But few months later, Europe went a step further with the Turkey-EU deal and neglected its international duties to respect the human rights of the refugees. The way Europe responded to these refugees with this deal contributes to undermine their dignity. Even more serious is that what happened in Europe with this deal with Turkey is going to have an impact in other countries. If Europe has push the refugees away to Turkey, why can not Kenya do the same? So during the last weeks, the Kenyan Government decide that their 25- year-old refugee camp will stop working because they decided that Somali refugees should go back. After the Turkey deal, Europe have no moral right to criticize the Kenyan government. If European states respond to humanitarian crisis by just shutting the doors to refugees, we have led the way now not to protect refugees. Europes example could lead other countries not to protect the refugees.
The EU-Turkey deal was done in a hurry, without a long term plan policy and with insufficient resources and planning. However the idea to create a safe legal route should be implemented and Europe has to create a managed system of protection. However the way it has been done with the EU-Turkey deal has been too late, with insufficient resources and plans, poorly executed and with a very high political price.
We need a system that could help to share burdens on global problems, based on GDP per capita, net debt per capita… It is necessary to create a system of responsibility sharing quotas that it is not the same as burden sharing quotas.
In summary, we really need a new approach, a new narrative that recognizes that refugees do not have to be a burden. It is necessary to create opportunities and spaces that will give to the newcomers the chance to make their contributions to the economy and society with their skills, knowledge, hope and dreams.
European or Global politico-humanitarian crisis?
During 2015 Europe had a political and humanitarian crisis that has been framed mainly as a refugee crisis. However if we look at the global numbers of 25 million of refugees in the world we find out that Europe only has 1% of the refugees.
The Syrian humanitarian crisis had pointed to an international problem and it reminds us of the invisible refugees that we did not notice during decades. We have international treaties that recognize that refugees are a shared responsibility and still we accept that a small country like Lebanon hosts more Syrian refugees that the whole Europe. However, if we still think that refugees have the right to be protected and the refugee protection is based on human rights, then we started 2016 in a very bad way with the Europe-Turkey deal and the NATO control in the Mediterranean.
In spite of the complains of the EU countries, most of the refugees live in the global south. The Syrian crisis has been a good reminder to realize that 80% of the refugees live in developing countries which have to host the refugees in spite of their economic situation. For a long time Europe had been indifferent to the refugee crisis in other countries. From the beginning of the Syrian war, neighbour countries have received thousands of refugees everyday but we hardly hear of them till they were at Europe’s door. This crisis has put on the spot light invisible refugees who live in poor countries[4] and has put the focus of attention to the quality of protection outside the developed world because for decades we forgot them.
It seems that we are not able to fix the international complex global problems and the pull factors such as war, terrorism, natural disasters and poverty. However, we should remember that we have a moral responsibility to help.
We need a new model to implement the Refugee convention, the international refugee system should be able to create a model to share the financial burden and sharing quotas in a responsible way.
[1] Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 434 (1670)
[2] Hannah Arendt, The origin of Totalitarianism (1951)
[3] Hanna Arendt, We refugees (1943) http://www-leland.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/files/pdf/ hannah_arendt_we_refugees.pdf
[4] Most refugees live in only 10 countries (such as Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uganda, Kenya, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan , Cameroon and Niger).