RIGHTS-BELGIUM: Bon Voyage, Past That Barbed Wire

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Feb 27 2008 (IPS) - Barbed wire is not something most people notice when they take a plane from Brussels International Airport. Yet ominous coils of it surround one cluster of buildings within this vast complex. It is here in Centre 127 that asylum-seekers are welcomed to Belgium with a lock and a key.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of first use of the centre for its current purposes of detention. Through these years, it has attracted voluminous complaints from an array of international bodies.

In a recently published report, the European Parliament describes the centre, previously a quarantine area where people suspected of carrying infectious diseases were kept, as “dilapidated and insalubrious”, and says “severe overcrowding” is common. Because its conditions “correspond to a prison regime”, it should no longer be used to detain asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants who have not been charged with a criminal offence, the report argues.

In January, the centre also fell foul of the European Court of Human Rights. The Strasbourg-based court ruled that Belgium had wrongly deprived two Palestinians – Mohamad Riad and Abdelhabi Idiab – of the right to liberty. Arriving in Belgium in 2002, the two asylum-seekers were held at Centre 127 and subsequently at Merksplas, near this country’s border with the Netherlands, before being deported to Lebanon the following year.

“Centre 127 was set up in 1988 on a temporary basis and with prefabricated buildings,” said Cedric Vallet from CIRE, a Francophone organisation working with refugees and migrants. “Twenty years later it is still there and its conditions are not acceptable.”

Detainees, he noted, usually have to sleep in rooms with up to 20 beds, and find it difficult to rest because of the regular aircraft noise. He said people are frequently kept in the centre for the entire length of time it takes for their asylum applications to be processed. Officially, the length of detention for asylum-seekers cannot exceed five months, yet human rights activists say that once people are released, they can be swiftly re-arrested and held for an additional five months.

Last year, requests for asylum were lodged by 11,115 foreign nationals, a drop of 500 from 2006. A total of 2,122 applications were granted. Most of the successful applicants were from Chechnya, Iraq, Kosovo, Congo and Rwanda.

Data released by the Belgian Foreigners Office in October indicated that 8,800 asylum-seekers and migrants were detained during 2006.

One particularly controversial aspect of the country’s detention practices is that the number of children being held rose from 182 in 2004 to 700 in 2006.

Thanks to another ruling at the European Court of Human Rights, Belgium no longer detains children unaccompanied by their parents. In 2006, the court took issue with how Tabitha, then a five-year-old, was locked up and deported in 2002. She was travelling from Congo to Canada with her uncle, when she was separated from him and taken into custody when they stopped in Brussels. Tabitha’s uncle could not provide a permit for her to enter Belgium.

As a result of this verdict, the Belgian authorities say that they now only detain children alongside their parents.

But the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) argues that the detention of any child is incompatible with international law, and should only occur in extremely rare circumstances. The agency has called on Belgium to find alternatives to locking up families.

“Children have far less opportunities to have a proper education, to relax and to play if they are detained,” said Vanessa Saenen from the UNHCR’s Brussels office. “Very few facilities exist for children in Centre 127, where children sleep in dormitories together with adults who are not their relatives.”

A psychiatric paper published in the British Medical Journal during 2006 concluded that the use of detention in asylum cases “bodes poorly” for children’s “future adaptation, whether they are ultimately resettled or repatriated.”

Pieter de Gryse, director of Vluchtelingenwerk Vlaanderen, a Flemish organisation working with refugees, said: “Research has demonstrated that the whole set of circumstances is really traumatic for children in these centres. Clearly, it is like prison for them. And they are in a situation where parents can’t be parents any more because other people are dictating what they can and can’t do.”

According to the Foreigners Office, 18 migrant children are currently in detention. These belong to 11 families. The office argues that detention is unavoidable in cases where families have had their requests for asylum rejected and have been ordered to leave the country.

“It is in the best interests of children to keep families together,” said Katrien Jansseune, a spokeswoman for the office. “If we let the children out of the centres, there is a risk they won’t return, and if they don’t, we will not be able to repatriate their parents. We don’t have alternatives at the moment to guarantee that we can repatriate a family together with its children.”

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, the cornerstone of international asylum law, the detention of asylum-seekers is only permissible as a last resort. No precise definition of what constitutes a last resort is given, however.

While this allows governments considerable leeway, de Gryse indicates that Belgian practices run counter to the convention. “For certain categories of foreigners, detention is more or less routine,” he said, claiming that asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe are often detained because the authorities feel there is little likelihood that their applications will be successful.

A spokesman for the interior ministry denied that Belgium is disregarding international law. “There is a law here about people asking for asylum,” he said. “The ministry is following the law.”

Meanwhile, a report published earlier this month by the International Centre for Reproductive Health in Ghent suggested that asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants are highly vulnerable, regardless of whether they are detained.

Out of a sample of 223 asylum-seekers in Belgium and the Netherlands, the centre found that 39 percent had suffered sexual abuse. More than 300 cases of what the report describes as gender-based violence – ranging from sexual harassment to rape – were identified. About one-fifth of the abuses had been perpetrated by people working for official authorities.

One of the report’s authors, Ines Keygnaert, said that in most cases, the victims “didn’t dare report the abuses because they are afraid they would be deported.”