Migrants picked up by the Greek coastal guard in the Mediterranean. The European Union plans to expand its armed border guards from 1,500 to 10,000 by 2027 to patrol its land and sea borders. Credit: Nikos Pilos/IPS.

By Ida Karlsson
BRUSSELS, May 16 2019 (IPS)

The European Union plans to deploy 10 000 armed border guards by 2027 to patrol its land and sea borders. The force will have the power to use armed force on the EU’s external borders.

The European Border and Coast Guard agency, Frontex, currently employs 1 500 border guards and works alongside national border control agencies. The plan is to significantly strengthen the existing force.

The EU guards would intercept new arrivals, stop unauthorised travel and accelerate the return of people whose asylum claim have failed. The guards could also operate outside of the bloc — with the consent of the third country governments concerned.

"The agency will better and more actively support member states in the area of return in order to improve the European Union’s response to persisting migratory challenges,"

Dimitris Avramopoulos, European Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs

According to the spending plan for 2021 to 2027 proposed by the European commission, the bloc will increase spending on migration and security by 20,3 billion euros.

The plan to strengthen the European Border and Coast Guard agency was announced by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in a speech in Strasbourg in September last year.

“External borders must be protected more effectively,” he said.

“The agency will better and more actively support member states in the area of return in order to improve the European Union’s response to persisting migratory challenges,” European Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs Dimitris Avramopoulos says.

Migration has been a divisive issue within EU since the big influx of refugees in 2015. Fears and concerns over migration have led to right wing parties gaining traction and being elected to government in a number of member states.

However European borders are under much less pressure than they were a couple of years ago. The number of arrivals to the EU fell from a height of over 1 million in 2015 to just 144 000 in 2018, according to the International organization for migration, IOM.

Rights groups have warned against creating a “Fortress Europe” with external processing camps and border guards able to use force.

Philippe Dam, Human Rights Watch’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia, says they see a clear shift from asylum and protection to border management and returns.

“The EU strategy is to push asylum seekers and refugees away from EU borders. It raises the question what will be the legal pathways for people in need of protection. This is not going hand in hand with improvements of the asylum system. People are sent back to situations of abuse,” he told IPS.

Human Rights Watch have documented unnecessary violence by national border guards in Greece, Bulgaria and Croatia. Hungary is also locking up people at its border and depriving them of food.

“It is unclear how abuses by the new EU borders are going to be investigated. We see the risk of accountability gaps, ” Dam says.

Many Syrian cities have been reduced to piles of rubble, as a civil war that is now well into its fifth year shows no signs of abating. Desperate refugees are fleeing to Europe to escape the fighting. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

As the migration crisis in Europe continues to grow and government response remains slow, European citizens have taken it upon themselves to act by opening up their homes to those in need.

In a Facebook group entitled ‘Dear Eygló Harðar – Syria is Calling’, over 15,000 Icelanders have signed an open letter calling on their government to “open the gates” for more Syrian refugees.

The open letter, initiated by author and professor Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir on Aug. 30, addresses Iceland’s Minister of Welfare Eygló Harðar and calls on the government to reconsider capping the number of refugees at a mere 50.

The week-long campaign, which ends on Sep. 4, aims to gather information about available assistance and to create pressure on the government to increase its quota.

“Refugees are our […] best friends, our next soul mate, the drummer in our children’s band, our next colleague, Miss Iceland 2022, the carpenter who finally fixes our bathroom, the chef in the cafeteria, the fireman, the hacker and the television host. People who we’ll never be able to say to: ‘Your life is worth less than mine’,” the open letter states.

Many have posted their own open letters, offering their homes, food, and general support to refugees, to enable them to integrate into Icelandic society.

One Icelander posted on the group: “I’m a single mother with a six-year-old son […] we can take a child in need. I’m a teacher and would teach the child to speak, read and write Icelandic and adjust to Icelandic society. We have clothes, a bed, toys, and everything a child needs. I would of course pay for the airplane ticket.”

The open letter has sparked more people around the world to express words of support and to offer their homes to those in need.

One mother of a 19-month-old baby from Argentina wrote in the group: “I want you to know that I would like to help in any way I can, even if it is looking at the possibility of hosting some boy or girl in my house […]. I don’t have a comfortable financial position, but I can provide what is necessary and a lot of love.”

Similar efforts to house refugees have begun in other parts of Europe.

Refugees Welcome, a German initiative, matches refugees from around the world with host citizens offering private accommodation.

Once hosts sign up to offer their homes, Refugees Welcome works with local refugee organizations to reach out to find a “suitable” match.

Though only Germany and Austrian residents can currently be hosts, over 780 people have already signed up to help and more than 134 refugees from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria have been matched with families in the two countries.

Refugees Welcome also stated that the initiative has been picked up and may be expanded to the United States and Australia.

“We are convinced that refugees should not be stigmatized and excluded by being housed in mass accommodations. Instead, we should offer them a warm welcome,” says Refugees Welcome on its website.

European Union’s border agency Frontex revealed that in July 2015 alone, over 100,000 people migrated into Europe. Germany has stated that it expects up to 800,000 asylum seekers by the end of the year.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In response to the rapidly growing numbers of refugees and asylum seekers flooding European shores, France and the UK have announced new measures to crack down on English Channel crossings.

The deal consists of a new joint command and control centre in the northern French port city of Calais that aims to “relentlessly pursue and disrupt the callous criminal gangs that facilitate and profit from the smuggling of vulnerable people, often with total disregard for their lives,” Britain’s Home Secretary Theresa May stated during a press conference Thursday.

Calais has become the focal point of a growing migration crisis, largely fueled by wars, hunger and political repression driving hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians out of countries like Syria, Libya, Sudan and other states across the Middle East and Africa.

An estimated 3,000 refugees live in makeshift tents in French port city.

The agreement also includes tough security measures such as increased police numbers, fencing, and CCTV to secure the Channel’s tunnel. The UK government has also pledged to establish a fast-track asylum process and to fund return flights for migrants. Britain plans to contribute 11.2 million dollars to the effort.

“Our joint approach rests on securing the border, identifying and safeguarding the vulnerable, preserving access to asylum for those who need it and giving no quarter to those who have no right to be here or who break the law,” said May and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in the 6-page agreement.

However, Calais is only one of many regions seeing increased migration.

The European Union’s border agency Frontex declared on Aug. 18 that in the month of July alone, some 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe, more than triple the figure in July 2014, representing the first time since the agency began keeping records in 2008 that new arrivals surpassed the 100,000 mark in a single month.

What will the new agreement mean for Eritreans?

Many of the migrants that make the perilous crossing into Europe are from Eritrea. Each month, approximately 5,000 Eritreans leave the small country of six million people in the Horn of Africa, reported a U.N. commission of inquiry on June 2015.

In a migration pattern report, Frontex found that Eritrean refugees were the second largest group in 2014 to have migrated to Europe, after Syrians.

Eritreans flee to escape gross human rights violations committed by the Eritrean government.

In the 2015 inquiry report, the U.N. commission found cases of extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labour, enforced disappearance, as well as restrictions on speech, religious expression, and movement.

The commission also detailed the Eritrean government’s policy of military conscription, which forces men and women into national service indefinitely. This has prompted thousands of young Eritreans to flee the country.

Though the U.N. commission recognised that military conscription of citizens is a “prerogative of sovereign States,” it stated that it still involves the unlawful denial of freedoms and rights.

The commission concluded that the Eritrean government’s human rights restrictions could constitute crimes against humanity.

As a result, Eritreans migrate to Europe via neighboring countries of Sudan and Egypt. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Eritrea, Sheila Keetharuth, expressed concern over the human rights abuses in Eritrea to the General Assembly in 2013, stating, “The fact that they have crossed borders is indicative of the scale of despair these children are facing at home.”

The journey is not without its risks. Human Rights Watch has reported the brutal trafficking and torture of Eritreans for ransom money. Refugees also face the threat of treacherous boat accidents such as the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck that killed over 350 Eritreans.

But many are willing to face such dangers. While speaking to the Guardian, an Eritrean refugee discussed the decision to migrate to Europe, stating: “I have two choices – one is to die, the other is to live. If I die at sea, it won’t be a problem – at least I won’t be tortured.”

Such sentiments are heard often among refugees and asylum seekers who are increasingly risking hazardous journeys on makeshift vessels to escape brutal, degrading or even deadly conditions in their home countries.

In response to the situation in Calais, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee Programme Director Steve Symonds said that May must drop “tough” rhetoric on refugees and discuss “how the UK can save lives and protect the vulnerable.”

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, over 3,000 asylum seekers entering the UK in the first three months of 2015 were Eritrean, constituting the majority of applicants.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Mohammed (left) and Ahmed, two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, although they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
AUGUSTA, Syracuse, Italy , May 11 2015 (IPS)

Not even a month has passed since over 700 hundred migrants lost their lives in their attempt to reaching the shores of Italy and the media spotlights have already faded on the island of Sicily, Italy’s southern region and main gateway to Europe.

Yet, the migration flows have not stopped.

Five days ago, on May 3, 300 people arrived in the port of Augusta, in the province of Syracuse, and among them were 19-year-old Ahmed and 22-year-old Mohammed.“That boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now” – Mohammed, a Somali migrant who survived crossing the Mediterranean to reach Italy

Both come from Somalia but they met in Libya, where they had worked for several months in order to save enough money to pay the smugglers running the traffic in migrants across the Mediterranean.

Ahmed and Mohammed are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, but they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Ahmed wants to go to Belgium, where some of his relatives already live, while Mohammed hopes to continue his trip towards Germany.

Crossing the Mediterranean was frightening, but they seem to have left all of their fears on the Libyan shores and their eyes are full of hope for the future.

“The sight of the sea from Libya was so scary, but when I look at it from here, it’s beautiful again,” says Ahmed, who is hoping to be able to study in Europe and become a doctor.

For Mohammed, “that boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now.”

Before leaving Libya, Ahmed had heard about the tragedy of the 700 who lost their lives, but that did not stop him because, he says, the risks are higher in Somalia than on the boats.

“The weather has been bad these days, but look how calm the sea is today,” a carabiniere standing in front of the centre told IPS. “We are getting ready for many, many more to arrive.”

Despite the fact that more than 25,000 migrants have already made it to Italy this year, the actual ‘migration season’ is just about to start. Meanwhile, Europe is lurching to answer southern European states’ request for help.

Currently, the Mediterranean is patrolled under Operation Triton, a border security operation conducted by Frontex, the European Union’s border security agency, which aims to deter migrants. Operation Triton replaced Operation Mare Nostrum, which had been a broader Italian search and rescue initiative.

During an extraordinary European summit on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean held on Apr. 23, E.U. leaders agreed to triple funding for rescue operations in the Mediterranean, but this is far from being the ‘European solution’ to the migration crisis.

“Of course more capacity and more boats and early detection by planes increase the possibility of saving more people,” the Frontex press officer in Catania, Ewa Moncure, told IPS.

“But even with the best efforts, if people are put on these boats and sent to sea with no safety equipment, with not enough water, then nobody can guarantee that they will be found on time and that the rescue services will save everybody, because that would be simply a lie.”

While E.U. leaders continue to discuss possible naval blocks off Libyan territorial waters and southern European states try to open a debate on quotas of refugees to be shared among all member states, local authorities and Sicilian citizens are left with the task of handling the first aid and reception operations.

Augusta, a town of around 40,000 inhabitants, is one of the main bases of the Italian Navy in Sicily and it served as the headquarters of the Mare Nostrum operation, until it ended in October 2014.

Between April and October 2014, the town also hosted an emergency centre for unaccompanied minors, raising concerns and complaints of around 2,000 people who signed a petition to move the centre somewhere else and to propose naval blocks at the departure ports.

“This petition suggested exonerating from the allocation of migrants those municipalities that already suffer from economic insolvency and high unemployment levels, as is the case of Augusta,” Pietro Forestiere, local spokesperson for the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party and one of the initiators of the petition, explained to IPS.

“The logic behind it is that you cannot ask someone who is already struggling to deliver proper services to its citizens to take care of migrant reception as well.”

The emergency centre of Augusta was eventually closed in October, but its example could be easily extended to the whole region, which suffers from the highest levels of poverty and the second highest unemployment rate in the whole of Italy.

Yet, despite the voices calling for strong action against immigration, it is very common to hear people in Augusta sympathise with the migrants, especially when it comes to refugees.

“They are made of flesh and blood, just like us. We simply can’t let them drown,” Alfonso, who owns a stand in the fish market, told IPS. “They are escaping war and poverty. If we can’t prevent them from coming, once they approach the coast, we must help them.”

Most citizens in Sicily do not appear to fear future arrivals. The problem is rather the feeling of being abandoned in handling the situation, as a customer at the market pointed out:

“This is a port, we have always been used to seeing foreigners around. The impact on our daily life is quite limited. Yet, something needs to be done, not so much for us but rather to help them, and we can’t do it on our own. This is a European – if not global – issue, and Europe must act.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Boat carrying asylum seekers and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Photo credit: UNHCR/L.Boldrini

By Sean Buchanan
ROME, Apr 15 2015 (IPS)

“The unbearable number of lives lost at sea will only grow if the European Union does not act now to ensure search-and-rescue operations across the Mediterranean,” Human Rights Watch warned Apr. 15.

The international human rights organisation was reacting to reports that as many as 400 migrants may have died in the Mediterranean sea over the past weekend, according to witness accounts collected by the Save the Children charity among the more than 7,000 migrants and asylum seekers rescued by the Italian Coast Guard since Apr. 10.

Noting that 11 bodies have been recovered so far from one confirmed shipwreck over the past few days, Judith Sunderland, acting deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch said that “if the reports are confirmed, this past weekend would be among the deadliest few days in the world’s most dangerous stretch of water for migrants and asylum seekers.”

Many of those rescued over the weekend remain on Italian vessels as authorities scramble to find emergency accommodation, and Human Rights Watch said that the lack of preparation for arrivals was entirely preventable because many had predicted that 2015 would be a record year for boat migration.

“Other E.U. countries have shown a distinct lack of political will to help alleviate Italy’s unfair share of the responsibility,” according to the human rights organisation.

The European Union’s external border agency, Frontex, launched Operation Triton in the Mediterranean in November 2014, as Italy downsized its massive humanitarian naval operation, Mare Nostrum, which has been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

Triton’s geographic scope and budget is far more limited than Mare Nostrum, and the primary mandate of Frontex is border control, not search and rescue.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as many as 500 migrants and asylum seekers have died already in the Mediterranean in 2015, a 30-fold increase over recorded deaths in the same period in 2014.

However, said Human Rights Watch, if the reports of hundreds more dead over the past few days are confirmed, the death toll in just over three months would be nearly 1,000 people, and that number is likely to rise as more migrants take to the seas during the traditional crossing season in the spring and summer months. The death toll for all of 2014 was at least 3,200 people.

The European Commission is to present a “comprehensive migration agenda” to E.U. member states in May but some of the proposals, while cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric about preventing deaths at sea, raise serious human rights concerns, Human Rights Watch said.

These include setting up offshore processing centres in North African countries, outsourcing border control and rescue operations in order to prevent departures, and increasing financial assistance to deeply repressive countries like Eritrea, one of the key countries of origin for asylum seekers attempting the sea crossing, “without evidence of human rights reforms.”

While some proposals contain elements that could potentially address root causes of irregular migration or provide safe alternatives for migrants, Human Rights Watch said that the proof of their success will rest on whether they respect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, rather than simply stop the flow.

Early signs of intent suggest that rather than building the capacity to protect, the emphasis will be on enhancing and outsourcing containment mechanisms to prevent departures, and “it’s hard not to see these proposals as cynical bids to limit the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers making it to E.U. shores,” Sunderland said.

“Whatever longer term initiatives may come forth, the immediate humanitarian imperative for the European Union is to get out there and save lives.”

Meanwhile, the debate around immigration in Italy has taken on xenophobic tones in some quarters, with the leader of Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League, Matteo Salvini, calling on all local authorities to resist “by any means” requests to accommodate asylum seekers, and saying that his party is ready to occupy buildings to prevent arrivals.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Sub-Saharan migrant garbage collectors push their carts through the streets of Tripoli´s old town. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

It’s easy to spot Saani Bubakar in Tripoli´s old town: always dressed in the distinctive orange jumpsuit of the waste collectors, he pushes his cart through the narrow streets on a routine that has been his for the last three years of his life.

“I come from a very poor village in Niger where there is not even running water,” explains the 23-year-old during a break. “Our neighbours told us that one of their sons was working in Tripoli, so I decided to take the trip too.”

Of the 250 Libyan dinars [about 125 euro or 154 dollars] Bubakar is paid each month, he manages to send more than half to his family back home. Accommodation, he adds, is free.

“We are 50 in an apartment nearby,” says the migrant worker, who assures that he will be back in Niger “soon”. It is not the poor working conditions but the increasing instability in the country that makes him want to go back home.

Thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks” – Human Rights Watch
Three years after Libya´s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled and killed, Libya remains in a state of political turmoil that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war. There are two governments and two separate parliaments – one based in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk, 1,000 km east of the capital. The latter, set up after elections in June when only 10 percent of the census population took part, has international recognition.

Accordingly, several militias are grouped into two paramilitary alliances: Fajr (“Dawn” in Arabic), led by the Misrata brigades controlling Tripoli, and Karama (“Dignity”) commanded by Khalifa Haftar, a Tobruk-based former army general.

The population and, very especially, the foreign workers are seemingly caught in the crossfire. “I´m always afraid of working at night because the fighting in the city usually starts as soon as the sun hides,” explains Odar Yahub, one of Bubakar´s roommates.

At 22, Yahub says that will not go back to Niger until he has earned enough to get married – but that will probably take longer than expected:

“We haven´t been paid for the last four months, and no one has given us any explanation,” the young worker complains, as he empties his bucket in the garbage truck.

While most of the sweepers are of sub-Saharan origin, there are also many who arrived from Bangladesh. Aaqib, who prefers not to disclose his full name, has already spent four years cleaning the streets of Souk al Juma neighbourhood, east of the capital. He says he supports his family in Dhaka – the Bangladeshi capital – by sending home almost all the 450 Libyan dinars (225 euros) from his salary, which he has not received for the last four months either.

“Of course I’ve dreamed of going to Europe but I know many have died at sea,” explains Aaqib, 28. “I´d only travel by plane, and with a visa stamped on my passport,” he adds. For the time being, his passport is in the hands of his contractor. All the waste collectors interviewed by IPS said their documents had been confiscated.

Defenceless

From his office in east Tripoli, Mohamed Bilkhaire, who became Minister of Employment in the Tripoli Executive two months ago, claims that he is not surprised by the apparent contradiction between the country´s 35 percent unemployment rate – according to his sources – and the fact that all the garbage collectors are foreigners.

“Arabs do not sweep due to sociocultural factors, neither here nor in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq … We need foreigners to do the job,” says Bilkhaire, Asked about the garbage collectors´ salaries, he told IPS that they are paid Libya´s minimum income of 450 Libyan dinars, and that any smaller amount is due to “illegal subcontracting which should be prosecuted.”

Bilkhaire also admitted that passports were confiscated “temporarily” because most of the foreign workers “want to cross to Europe.”

According to data gathered and released by FRONTEX, the European Union´s border agency, among the more than 42,000 immigrants who arrived in Italy during the first four months of 2014, 27,000 came from Libya.

In a report released by Human Rights Watch in June, the NGO claimed that thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks.”

“Detainees have described to us how male guards strip-searched women and girls and brutally attacked men and boys,” said Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher in the same report.

In the case of foreign workers under contract, Hanan Salah, HRW researcher for Libya, told IPS that “with the breakdown of the judicial system in many regions, abusive employers and those who do not comply with whatever contract was agreed upon, can hardly be held accountable in front of the law.”

Shokri Agmar, a lawyer from Tripoli, talks about “complete and utter helplessness”:

“The main problem for foreign workers in Libya is not merely the judicial neglect but rather that they lack a militia of their own to protect themselves,” Agmar told IPS from his office in Gargaresh, west of Tripoli.

That is precisely one of the districts where large numbers of migrants gather until somebody picks them up for a day of work, generally as construction workers.

Aghedo arrived from Nigeria three weeks ago. For this 25-year-old holding a shovel with his right hand, Tripoli is just a stopover between an endless odyssey across the Sahara Desert and a dangerous sea journey to Italy.

“There are days when they do not even pay us, but also others when we can make up to 100 dinars,” Aghedo tells IPS.

The young migrant hardly lowers his guard as he is forced to distinguish between two types of pick-up trucks: the ones which offer a job that is not always paid and those driven by the local militia – a false step and he will end up in one of the most feared detention centres.

“I know I could find a job as a sweeper but I cannot wait that long to raise the money for a passage in one of the boats bound for Europe,” explains the young migrant, without taking his eyes off the road.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The Italian Navy rescued 1,004 refugees and migrants on 14 August 2014. Some arrived barefoot, some children were shaking with cold. Men, women and children from Syria, Somalia, Gambia, Bangladesh and other countries were rescued. Credit: Amnesty International

By Matt Carr
MATLOCK, United Kingdom, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Since the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean has become the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration, having claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives in the last two decades.  

And the first nine months of 2014 indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than in any previous year.

Last month, a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that 3,072 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year out of a worldwide total of 4,077 deaths worldwide.  These figures are almost certainly underestimates, because many migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are not reported.

In the same month, a report from Amnesty International on migrant deaths in the Mediterranean estimated that 2, 200 migrants died between the beginning of June and mid-September alone.“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming”

The worst incident in this period took place on Sep 11. when 500 men, women and children, many of them refugees from Syria and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, drowned after their boat was deliberately rammed by their traffickers in Maltese territorial waters.

This horrendous crime took place less than one year after the horrific events of Oct. 3 last year, when at least 360 migrants drowned when their boat sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

At the time, the drownings at Lampedusa prompted an unprecedented outpouring of international anger and sympathy.

Pope Francis, European politicians such as Cecilia Malmstrom (European Commissioner for Home Affairs) and Juan Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission), and  U.N. Secretary-General  Ban Ki-Moon all joined in the chorus of condemnation and called on Europe and the international community to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Twelve months later, these worthy declarations have yet to be realised.

Following the Lampedusa tragedy, Italy undertook the largest combined naval/coastguard search and rescue operation in its history – known as ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ – to coincide with Italian occupancy of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.    At a cost of nine million euros per month, the operation has rescued 100,000 people.

Yet despite these efforts, the death toll is already four times higher than it was in the whole of last year.  This increase is partly due to the rise in the numbers of people crossing, primarily as a result of the Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Libyan state. This year, more than 130,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, compared with 60,000 the previous year.

A group of Somali women, among those rescued by the Italian Navy vessel Virginio Fasan, between 13 and 14 August 2014. Credit: Amnesty International

These numbers have tested the resources of Malta and Italy.  Some drownings have occurred as a result of a lack of clarity and coordination between the two countries over their mutual search and rescue areas.  In addition, Malta has sometimes been reluctant to rescue migrant boats in distress – a reluctance that some observers attribute to an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to accept them as refugees.

But the European Union has also been conspicuously absent from the unfolding tragedy on its southern maritime borders.

Despite numerous calls from the Italian government for assistance, it was not until August this year that the European Union mandated ‘Frontex’ – the European border agency – to undertake ‘Operation Triton’ in the Mediterranean to complement Italy’s search and rescue operations.

But Frontex is primarily concerned with immigration enforcement rather than search and rescue, and the joint operations that it coordinates are entirely dependent on resources provided by E.U. member states.

Glaring lack of response

It is at this level that the lack of response is most glaring.  There are many things that European governments could do to implement to reduce migrant deaths.

They could use their navies to establish the ‘humanitarian corridors’ between North Africa and Europe, as the U.N. refugee agency UNCHR once suggested during the Libyan Civil War.  They could facilitate legal entry, so that men, women and children fleeing war and political oppression can reach Europe safely without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers. 

The European Union could also abolish or reform the Dublin Regulation that obliges asylum seekers to make their applications in one country only.  This law has placed too much responsibility on European ‘border countries’ like Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which have experienced surges in irregular migration over the last twenty years.

More generally, Europe could establish an international dialogue with migrant-producing countries to make labour migration safe and mutually beneficial. However, many governments clearly regard ‘Mare Nostrum’ as an essential moat between ‘Fortress Europe’ and its unwanted migrants.

Most migrants who cross the Mediterranean are refugees from nationalities that UNHCR considers to be in need of some form of protection under the terms of the Geneva Convention.   But in order to obtain this, they have to reach Europe first and undergo all the risks that these journeys entail.

All this has transformed the Mediterranean into what Amnesty calls a “survival test” for refugees and migrants. Few politicians will openly admit this because such an admission would directly contradict the values that the European Union has set out to uphold since the European project first took shape after World War II.

Most governments prefer instead to condemn the smugglers and organised criminals who profit from such journeys, and wring their hands whenever a particularly terrible tragedy takes place. Men who sink migrant boats or send them to sea without lifebelts certainly deserve to be condemned.

But, as Amnesty International points out, Europe’s ”woeful response” has also contributed to the death toll.  And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21^st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming.

Until these priorities change, migrants will continue to die, and 2014’s grim record may well be superseded.  Italy has already threatened to stop its search and rescue operations when its presidency of the European Union comes to an end later this year.

Amnesty International has urged European governments to fulfil their humanitarian obligations to save lives in the Mediterranean and warned that “the EU as a whole cannot be indifferent to this suffering.”

So far, there is little sign that anybody is listening.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The author posts blogs on this and other issues at infernalmachine.co.uk/

‘Mare Nostrum’ – the largest search and rescue immigration operation ever carried out in the Mediterranean Sea – has become an issue of bitter brinkmanship between human rights groups and anti-immigrant lobbies.

At a higher political level, it has produced a tough negotiation between Italy and Europe, with the former asking for a European solution to immigration control in the Mediterranean.

Abandoned migrant boats lie lifeless opposite the port of Lampedusa, Italy, an island which experiences frequent migration from nearby North Africa. Credit: UN Photo/UNHCR/Phil Behan

‘Mare Nostrum’ was launched in October 2013 by Italy in the wake of a shipwreck south of the island of Lampedusa – the southernmost part of Italy lying 176 km off the coast of Sicily – that took the lives of 368 immigrants, mostly refugees from Syria and African countries.

The search and rescue operation is a military naval operation supported by the Italian Air Force and Coast Guard as well as civilian volunteers and medical personnel. It has operated in a vast area of the Central Mediterranean.

Between October 2013 and August 2014, ‘Mare Nostrum’ rescued over 115,000 people, mostly refugees, and transferred them to Italian territory. About 2,000 people are estimated to have lost their lives in the Mediterranean during the same period.

Human rights activists have praised the operation for rescuing refugees while its opponents have blamed it for producing a pull factor for immigrants and providing an illicit shuttle to Europe for them, making the job of traffickers easier.

The European Commission has now decided to flank the ‘Mare Nostrum’ initiative, although it has no intention of replacing it. After a meeting on August 27, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom and Italian Minister of the Interior Angelino Alfano announced a new Frontex operation to stand by Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation in the Mediterranean.

One of the main roles of Frontex – the European Union agency for external border security that started operations in May 2005 – is to protect Europe’s external borders from illegal immigration and people trafficking.

Announcing the new operation, which has temporarily been named ‘Frontex Plus’, Commissioner Malmstrom called on European member states to translate “oral solidarity into concrete action” by contributing resources and means.Humanitarian organisations in Italy have been quick to criticise ‘Frontex Plus’, saying that its description is still vague and that its primary aim is not the rescuing of immigrants and refugees but the upgrading of border surveillance and deterrence.

Ska Keller, Green Member of the European Parliament  told IPS that the new operation is “the result of pressure extorted by Italy on Brussels, but not what Italy has been asking for. It’s true Italy is rescuing a lot of people but this is not their main concern, they will not necessarily be happy to continue with Mare Nostrum.”

Humanitarian organisations in Italy have been quick to criticise ‘Frontex Plus’, saying that its description is still vague and that its primary aim is not the rescuing of immigrants and refugees but the upgrading of border surveillance and deterrence.

Silvia Canciani, press officer of the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI), told IPS that her association is “extremely concerned” because the only certainty about the new operation “is that ships will patrol only in European waters, 12 miles from the coast”, meaning they will no longer venture into international waters, like ‘Mare Nostrum’, which operated 170 miles from the Italian coast.

She added that it is still unknown whether Italian authorities plan to postpone, amend or carry on with ‘Mare Nostrum’ as it is, but a withdrawal from the operation might have a direct consequence on lives being lost in the Mediterranean.

Other critical voices stress how conservatives in the European Union see an opportunity in the negotiations that will follow on the new operation to capitalise on the issue of returning incoming migrants to safe third countries or to their countries of embarkation.

In a blog commenting on the announcement of ‘Frontex Plus’, Italian law professor Fulvio Vassalo Paleologo, a well-known commentator on immigration issues in the region, observed that in their joint announcement “the word ‘rescue’ has disappeared from Alfano’s and Malmstom’s vocabulary.” He also noted that neither of them had made a single remark about the conditions immigrants face in transit countries.

Both could be indications that the European Commission is seriously considering pushing for the control of population influxes outside European borders.

One day before the Malmstrom-Alfano announcement, the Italian edition of Huffington Post published an article citing an anonymous source in the Italian Ministry of the Interior, who was present at negotiations for the new operations in Brussels, as saying that “many people in Brussels see Mare Nostrum as an informal ferry for migrants.”

The unprecedented flows Europe is going to face given the geopolitical crisis in the Middle East will enforce a change of policy, which will translate into trying to “manage the flows of refugees and migrants in transit countries before they are on board for Italy,” the source said.

For this, he continued “we must work to re-negotiate readmission agreements with countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco” and then stop incoming immigrants on board and not let them proceed to Italy “unless they have already started the procedures for refugee status and we have already made identifications before they are on board.”

The policy scenario in the Huffington Post article was vividly mirrored in an Italian Interior Ministry’s press release two days later, after a meeting between Minister Alfano and his French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve to discuss “illegal immigration in the Central Mediterranean”.

Notably the meeting took place only one day after the announcement of ‘Frontex Plus’ in which France is expected to be one of the most active partners.

In the ministry’s press release, the term ‘rescue’ is again absent and the definition of the aim of ‘Frontex Plus’ is to “ensure control and surveillance of the external sea borders of the European Union … according to the rules of Frontex.”

From the press release, it also appears that both the Italian and French ministers believe that the issue of immigration should increasingly be dealt with “as a foreign policy issue” with “more emphasis to be given to the role of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, meaning the European External Action Service (EEAS) which implements the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.

The two ministers also identified two key policy objectives to push for within the European Union: “the commitment of all Member States of the European Union to a strict application of the rules for the identification of illegal migrants provided by European legislation and the strengthening of cooperation with countries of origin and transit in the field of border surveillance, police cooperation and development aid to these countries.”

Frontex’s key role in a new operation could facilitate these objectives given that the regulation “establishing rules for the surveillance of the external sea borders in the context of operational cooperation coordinated by the European Agency for the Management of Operation Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the EU (Frontex)” adopted on April 30, 2014, includes provisions for the interception of incoming vessels in international waters and their return to third countries.

Many pro-immigrant organisations such as Frontexit (a campaign led by associations, researchers and individuals from both North and South of the Mediterranean on the initiative of the Migreurop network), the Belgian Coordination Initiative for Refugees and Foreigners (CIRE), as well as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, have indicated highly controversial legal gaps in the regulation that could compromise the rights of persons in need of international protection.

In a joint briefing, the latter said that despite some positive aspects, other aspects fail to meet the requirements of international law, including refugee law, human rights law, the law of the sea and E.U. law.

When asked to comment on the nature of the ‘Frontex Plus’ operation, Malmstroms’s office said: “At the moment we do not have anything to add in addition to the statement made by the Commissioner last week. The Commission is working on the definition of the adequate operational area and the components of a larger joint operation which can be a useful complement to the Italian efforts.”

It is thus clear that ‘Frontex Plus’ will eventually only play a merely auxiliary role alongside Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation, particularly so when the costs of the operation are taken into account.

‘Mare Nostrum’ costs Italy over 9 million euro each month, while the current entire 2014 budget for Frontex is 89 million euro, with only 55 of them allocated for operational activities.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Group of asylum seekers in Casoli, near Bagni di Lucca, Italy. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

His journey started four years ago in Conakry, Guinea. Now that Mamoudou* has finally reached Italy, he hopes this will be his final stop.

When he first left his home, his plan was to stay in Libya, but after the 2011 crisis, when Gaddafi’s government was overthrown, life in the country became very hard for migrants. “I was jailed 28 times, and tortured,” he told IPS, “so I decided to come to Italy, because it’s a democracy and I hope I will have a peaceful and secure life here.”

Together with 13 other asylum seekers from Mali, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Mamoudou is now living in a tiny village in the Tuscan mountains, where the ‘Partecipazione e Sviluppo’ association is taking care of his application.“While trying to look at tackling the root causes [of migration] in economic disparity may be a laudable objective, it is not going to make a difference any time soon […] Without an effective rescue response people are going to drown, and they have drowned, and more will drown” – Benjamin Ward, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch

They all arrived between April and June from Libya, where they had migrated to escape conflicts and hunger and it is now painful for them to recall how their voyage took. “

In order to smuggle me to the Libyan coast, they put me in the boot of a car,” says Mamoudou. “I don’t know how many hours I spent there and what day I left Libya, but my registration documents say I arrived in Sicily on April 11. “

He paid the equivalent of 1,000 dollars to human traffickers to share a boat with 80 people and no skipper. “They told us where the North was and that we should have taken turns steering. When the Italian Navy found us, we had no idea where we were and the boat was already sinking.”

Since the tragedy off the Italian island of Lampedusa, which left more than 350 migrants dead in October last year, the Italian authorities have started a rescue operation called ‘Mare Nostrum’ (Our Sea). Mamoudou is one of the more than 80,000 migrants that have been saved since the operation started, winning appreciation from human rights NGOs and European Union authorities.

“Mare Nostrum is extremely important because it has saved many lives,” Benjamin Ward, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “We think it is something that needs to continue and we are among other groups calling for the European Union to respond positively to Italy’s call for European support for the operations”.

Given the high costs of the operations – about 9.3 million euro a month, according to Italian Navy – the Italian Minister of the Interior, Angelino Alfano, who is also leader of the New Centre Right (NCD) party, has stressed on several occasions the need for Frontex, the European Union border management agency, to take over Mare Nostrum.

“Mare Nostrum was set up as an emergency operation. It can’t last forever,” the minister told G6 interior ministers in Barcelona in June. ”Europe must replace Italy in this effort, and Italy will continue to make its contribution,” he added.

“Europe must come up with a clear strategy to regulate the flow of migrants. The Mediterranean that unites us is a European sea. It does not just belong to Italy, Spain, or any of the other countries that look onto this extraordinary body of water,” said the minister.

Yet, the answer of the European Commission leaves little room for negotiation. “Mare Nostrum is a very broad and expensive operation and Frontex is a small agency, it cannot take over Mare Nostrum,” Michele Cercone, spokesperson for EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström, explained to IPS. “Of course Frontex can and will contribute and can do a lot, but we don’t have the means to totally substitute it.”

Despite the widespread approval that the Italian rescue operation enjoys, Italian right-wing party Northern League has been calling for its termination since its early stages. “The only real outcome of Mare Nostrum is the favour we make to the traffickers, who can now leave tens of thousands of people at risk of dying, because they know the Navy will come and rescue them,” Massimiliano Fedriga, party leader in the Chamber of Deputies, told IPS.

“The only real solution is to have EU observatories in the North African countries to verify who has the right to receive asylum, which must be a European asylum and not the asylum of a single country. The others, the illegal migrants, who are the majority, should not come and must not come to our country,” he concluded.

Yet, in April Alfano had already said that “immigration is deeply changing profile […] there are increasingly more asylum seekers than economic migrants.”

Riccardo Noury, communications director of Amnesty International Italy, confirmed. “The migrants who arrive, when they manage to survive, at the European border, which is often the Italian and the Greek border, are mostly people who would have the right to asylum or other types of international protection,” he told IPS.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seem to be mostly concerned by Europe resistance to changing its approach towards migration.

“Obviously there are other aspects like border enforcement, like taking action against dangerous smuggling, which are important and need to continue, but we do think that saving lives should be the top priority,” said Ward.

“While trying to look at tackling the root causes in economic disparity may be a laudable objective, it is not going to make a difference any time soon […] Without an effective rescue response people are going to drown, and they have drowned, and more will drown. That in our view is something that has to be engaged. The European Union can’t simply say that it’s Italy’s mess to fix,” he added.

According to Noury, there are several reasons why Italy’s requests have not been heard.

“In the past years, Italy has lost the chance to show credible policies while asking for Europe’s support. We have been the country of push-backs, the country that threatened to release fake residence permits during the 2011 crisis to allow migrants to cross the Italian Northern border… we haven’t been a reliable partner when it came to reform the EU’s migration policies,”  the Amnesty International spokesperson commented.

“But we now have another opportunity, with the EU presidency [which Italy assumed for a six-month period at the beginning of July], to assume a leadership role.”

If Italy fails to obtain strategic and financial support from the European Union, it will be soon forced to scale down or discontinue its rescue operations. One year after the Lampedusa tragedy, exactly same conditions might be in place, and the consequences could be deadly once again.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

 * Name changed to protect his identity.

With Italy having taken over presidency of the European Union (EU) until December 2014, questions remain regarding Europe’s migration policies as reports of migrants dying at sea while trying to reach Italy regularly make the headlines.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that since the beginning of 2014, 500 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea and almost 43,000 have been rescued by the Italian Navy.

However, Italy’s “Mare Nostrum operation has gone a long way towards addressing the issue of saving people’s lives,” says Anneliese Baldaccini, Amnesty International’s Senior Executive Officer for Asylum and Migration.

Mare Nostrum – the Italian search-and-rescue operation – was launched following the tragedy of October 2013, when 366 migrants died as the boat in which they were travelling sank off the coast of Lampedusa, an Italian island which is closer to Tunisia than Italy.“The EU needs to do more to create legal channels for asylum seekers and migrants” … at the moment, "the EU is focused almost exclusively on strengthening its borders” – Gregory Maniatis, advisor to the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration

Italy is the lone sponsor of the search-and-rescue initiative, investing an estimated nine million euros every month.

In an interview with IPS, Baldaccini highlighted the unsustainability of this operation, arguing that this is why “Amnesty is calling on the European Union to act in a concerted way to support Italy in these operations”. So far, she continued, “the EU has proved reluctant in doing so.”

“With its Mare Nostrum operation, Italy has been pushing for a collective humanitarian response,” said Gregory Maniatis, Senior Policy Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and advisor to Peter Sutherland, U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration. “But what is missing at the EU level is a common vision of the problem,” he told IPS.

“The EU needs to do more to create legal channels for asylum seekers and migrants,” Maniatis explained. At the moment, “the EU is focused almost exclusively on strengthening its borders.”

Maniatis also argued that the EU does not have a sustained focus “to improve asylum processing to create a truly common European system, to increase its capacity to receive refugees, and to establish ways for people to apply for asylum without undertaking the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.”

According to Amnesty International, there is a dichotomy between the “EU’s aspiration to promote human rights and the reality of human rights violations in member states.” In its recommendations to the Italian EU presidency, Amnesty International stated that currently, “border control measures expose migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers to serious harm.

Their detention is systemic, rather than exceptional. And their lack of agency makes them vulnerable to abject exploitation and abuse.”

Amnesty International has calledon Italy, in view of its presidency of the European Union, “to show leadership and steer the Union in the direction of human rights, putting people before politics”.

The European Council Summit held on June 26-27 agreed broad guidelines for Europe’s migration and asylum strategy but these “do not change the current status quo” according to Amnesty’s migration expert Baldaccini. They “even represent a setback,” she told IPS. Overall, said Baldaccini, they “show a lack of political commitment.”

She went on to explain that the Secretariat of the European Council has partly blamed the recent rise of far-right parties at the last European Parliament elections as being the reason why no progress was made in terms of migration policies.

In general, states – and not only far-right parties – are reluctant to “mention human rights as it could be perceived as encouraging more arrivals to Europe,” Baldaccini said.

Many organisations have called on the European Union to change its approach to migration policies. The Lampedusa tragedy is only one example of a long series of similar events, said Elena Crespi, Western Europe Programme Officer at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), an NGO representing 178 organisations throughout the world.

“Despite repeated commitments to change,” Crespi told IPS, “EU migration policies remain security driven, and aim at reinforcing border control while migrants’ rights are given little attention.”

One such example, she argued, is the increasing presence of FRONTEX, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union.

Crespi explained that the intensification of FRONTEX operations has not resulted in fewer incidents, nor better respect for migrants’ and asylum-seekers’ rights. On the contrary, an increased number of allegations have been made regarding human rights violations at the Union’s external borders, which remain unaddressed.

FRONTEX has turned down the recommendation by the E.U. Ombudsman to put in place a mechanism to allow alleged violations to be investigated.

This, said Crespi, raises questions regarding the compatibility of FRONTEX’s operations in terms of human rights.

The presence of the European Border Agency is not sufficient to prevent people from dying at sea, she noted. Instead, enhanced border control pushes more and more people into taking increasingly dangerous routes into Europe, thus putting their lives at risk.

Italy is now pushing for FRONTEX to assume the costs of the Mare Nostrum operations, explained Simona Moscarelli, a legal expert for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Rome. But to do this, the “FRONTEX mission will have to be revised because its mandate does not include search-and-rescue operations.”

“FRONTEX’s role is not to save lives but rather to prevent and deter migrants from coming into Europe,” Crespi told IPS.

Moreover, “the vast majority of migrants travelling across the Mediterranean Sea are Syrian and Eritrean nationals and should be entitled to asylum,” Moscarelli told IPS.

According to the UNHCR, the number of Syrians reaching Europe by sea increased in 2013. Last year, Italy rescued an estimated 11,307 Syrians in the Mediterranean.

“The European Union must overhaul its approach to migration, and put respect for migrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights at its centre. Opening new channels for regular migration, enhancing reception capacity including by increasing responsibility sharing for migrants coming into Europe and investigating human rights violations are some steps that could be taken in the right direction,” said Crespi.

Crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria. Credit: Graneits, CC 2.0 on Flickr

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Since November last year, Bulgaria has virtually closed its borders to an inflow of Syrian asylum seekers and other migrants trying to enter the country from Turkey, while EU institutions concerned appear to have acquiesced to this. 

Faced with a massive inflow of asylum seekers in 2013 – around 11,000 people lodged asylum applications in the country in 2013 compared with 1,000 on average in previous years – Bulgaria implemented a plan in autumn last year “to manage the crisis resulting from the enhanced migratory pressure.” Its main elements included building a 33 kilometre fence on the border with Turkey and increasing by 1,500 units the border police contingents patrolling that border.

"HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection.” - HRW report from April 29
It seems to have paid off: just over 100 asylum seekers managed to enter Bulgaria each month in the first part of this year, while at the start of the implementation of the plan, as many as 100 people on some days were being prevented from entering the country, according to statements of the Ministry of Interior. Svetozar Lazarov, Secretary General in the ministry, told Bulgarian media at the end of April that, since the beginning of 2014, 2,367 people have been prevented from crossing the border into Bulgaria.

The influx last year, which frightened Bulgarian authorities, came about in the context of a tightening of Greece’s borders and consequent shift northwards of land migrant routes from Turkey. Over half of the asylum seekers lodging claims in Bulgaria last year came from war-torn Syria. Over two million Syrians are currently seeking protection abroad, half of them children. Turkey alone is currently hosting over 700,000 Syrians.

Human Rights Watch published a report on April 29 in which it documents how, as part of implementation of the Bulgarian plan, people crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria were being summarily pushed back into Turkey, without being given a chance to lodge asylum applications and sometimes suffering abuse from border guards. The evidence of pushbacks comes from 177 interviews HRW conducted with migrants in Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria, during which 44 cases of summary return involving 519 people were reconstructed.

“From the situation in the countries of origin of most of the irregular border crossers – Syria and Afghanistan – it is reasonable to believe that many are seeking protection, yet the people we interviewed who were rejected at the border or from within the territory of Bulgaria were not given the opportunity to lodge asylum claims upon apprehension,” Bill Frelick, Director of HRW’s refugee programme, told IPS.

“HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection,” says the report.

According to the rights group, this strategy by the Bulgarian government breaches the non-refoulement principle (not returning or expelling people to places where their lives and freedoms could be threatened) included in the 1951 Refugee Convention that Bulgaria has ratified, as well as in EU legislation that Bulgaria is bound to implement (the EU’s Return Directive, the Schengen Border Code and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights).

“The border pushbacks documented in this report follow no proper procedure and carry a negative presumption that irregular border crossers are not seeking asylum when the presumption, at least with regard to people fleeing Syria and Afghanistan, ought to be that they are,” explains the report.

The study was lambasted in Bulgaria, including by the head of the State Agency for Refugees and the director of the Bulgarian Red Cross – one of the non-governmental bodies that works most closely with authorities – though both individuals have admitted to not having read the analysis. While critics focus on the fact that conditions for migrants in Bulgaria have improved since last year – a fact that the HRW report mentions anyway – no one addresses the main allegation, that the country has been implementing a systematic refoulement plan.

Bulgaria’s Minister of Interior Tsvetlin Yovchev, the main figure behind the plan, disputed claims by HRW that violence had been committed by border police against migrants entering the country. He told Bulgarian media that a guarantee of proper behaviour by Bulgarian police is the constant presence in border areas of specialists of Frontex, the EU border management agency.

That Frontex lends credibility to the Bulgarian government, at least in front of domestic audiences, is further hinted at by the fact that the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior tends to play up the numbers of Frontex troops present in the country. According to Frontex, only 40-50 Frontex officers have been present in Bulgaria at a time since 2011, and the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior is adding up numbers to report for example that, “in 2013, 3 joint operations were conducted on Bulgaria’s external borders which are also external for the European Union, with a total number of 216 experts and 30 translators from Frontex.”

Asked by IPS about Frontex’s participation in the plan implemented by the Bulgarian authorities, Frontex spokesperson Ewa Moncure replied that Frontex is an operational agency which merely implements border surveillance and second line activities (such as interviewing of migrants) agreed with the government in Sofia. According to Frontex, whatever measures the Bulgarian government has taken since November, even if Frontex was involved in implementation, are Bulgaria’s primary responsibility. Frontex also says that it investigates any complaints received about human rights abuses but that it had not received any in Bulgaria that refer to the violations cited by the HRW report.

In November last year, the European Ombudsman rejected “Frontex’s view that human rights infringements are exclusively the responsibility of the Member States concerned,” invoking as a case in point the deployment of EU border guards to Greece where migrant detainees were kept in detention centres under unacceptable conditions..

Given that refoulement is contradictory to EU legislation, human rights groups have said the European Commission could potentially start infringement procedures against the country (this can lead to legal action in front of the European Court of Justice and sanctions), but no decisive steps have been taken so far. Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the EU Commission on Home Affairs, responding to claims in the HRW report, told IPS that “the Commission is closely monitoring the asylum situation in Bulgaria and is in regular contact with the Bulgarian authorities.”

He said a so-called “pilot letter” has been sent to Bulgaria with a request for information, on the basis of which the EC will decide on the next steps; this, however, does not constitute the start of an infringement procedure, which would require a “letter of formal notice” coming only if the Commission were unsatisfied with the performance of the Bulgarian authorities.

3,000 people crossing the Bulgarian border in October 2013 compared with 99 in January 2014 are “figures which speak for themselves,” Ana Fontal from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a pan-European alliance of 82 migrant rights groups, told IPS.

“The European Commission should examine without delay border practices at the Bulgarian/Turkish border to investigate possible breaches of relevant provisions in EU asylum and migration law and consider initiating infringement proceedings if Bulgaria fails to take action to remedy the breaches identified,” said Fontal. “Other EU countries should not send asylum seekers back to Bulgaria until conditions there improve and authorities comply with international and EU law.”

A Frontex ship patrols the maritime border in Greece. Credit: Frontex.

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

A Nov. 19 paper by the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU diplomatic corps, considers the possibility of the European military getting involved in the south Mediterranean in an effort to curb the influx of irregular migrants and refugees into Europe.

The idea for a military operation initially appeared in an Italian proposal set forth on Oct. 24, suggesting extraordinary measures after the recent tragic events at Lampedusa in Sicily, where a boat that departed from Libya on Oct. 3 sank before reaching the island, killing 360 immigrants.

The incident sent shock waves throughout Europe and triggered a civil society dialog about European migration policy’s human cost. But many of Europe’s leaders have seen the tragedy as a reason for further militarisation of the region.

EEAS deputy spokesman Sebastien Brabant told IPS in an email interview that following the Oct. 3 incident in Lampedusa “the ‘Taskforce Mediterranean’ was created to set out proposals for immediate EU action” from which the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) proposal has emerged.

The proposal includes options for the interception of population movements towards Europe including an independent maritime operation or the implementation of extra measures within an ongoing Frontex – the EU border agency – operation in the region.

All options predict a central role for the CSDP, the key European instrument for dealing with international security crises.

The CSDP proposal as a platform for dealing with population movements that could occur as a result of destabilisation in the Mediterranean countries coincides with a pending consideration of the instrument’s future on the agenda of the European Council planned for later this month.

The EEAS will present its proposal when the heads of state discuss how to enhance defence capabilities, strengthen the defence industry and improve the effectiveness, visibility and impact of the CSDP.

The idea has provoked a backlash, with German MP Andrej Hunko, a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, saying that “Further militarisation of border surveillance will make crossings even riskier and lead to even more deaths. The EEAS even confirms this. The inhumane and frequently criticised approach taken by the EU border police, FRONTEX, is being reinforced.”

Meanwhile Frontex has already arranged to update its Joint Operations “Hermes”, launched to control illegal migration flows from Tunisia towards southern Italy, mainly Lampedusa and Sardinia, and “AENAAS”, combating illegal migration from the Ionian Sea towards Italy (mainly Apulia and Calabria) from Turkey and Egypt.

Italy has also put in place a national patrol operation named “MARE NOSTRUM” coordinated by the Italian military. An internal European paper issued on Apr 18 demonstrated the serious concern among European leadership about the possibility of Libya collapsing into sectarian war.

The paper was a blueprint for a civilian integrated European Union Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM), aiming to help establish and train a new territorial and maritime border guard in Libya. EUBAM, which is ongoing now, is also a CSDP mission.

EUobserver reported on Nov. 18 that elements in the internal EU paper indicated that the “civilian” EUBAM to Libya was in fact designed to also train “paramilitary forces, amid a wider European and U.S. effort to stop Libya becoming a ‘failed state’.

Militarisation of the central Mediterranean would complement earlier restrictions put in place in the southeastern part of the sea. In the spring of 2012, Greece adopted tough control policies, including deploying security forces to its borders, building a fence along its land border with Turkey, and detaining irregular migrants for up to 18 months.

As a result incoming flows shifted to new routes through the Western Balkans or revived older one in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

Meanwhile Spain has initiated project CLOSEYE, a multi-million euro border control project that will see drones and other means of surveillance being deployed over the southwestern Mediterranean.

The European Commission not only has bankrolled many of these operations but also has not effectively restrained member states from violating refugee and human rights, and even the principle of non-refoulement, against the expulsion of persons who have the right to be recognised as refugees.

Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen and an expert on the securitisation of European immigration policy told IPS that the question is why is the EEAS still proposing such options.

“Two reasons come to mind: Firstly, the Arab Spring brought with it the fall of dictators, who up until that point had been key allies funded by the EU, containing sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern migrants before they could reach European territory.” Since then, he said, “it seems that the EU has been looking to establish similar systems of control.”

“Secondly, it is important to note the timing of the EEAS’ proposals: they have been put forward just when the new EUROSUR [border] surveillance system is about to become operational. The EUROSUR system, which has been developed in close cooperation with the European arms industry, stresses exactly those goals listed in the EEAS options,” he said.

EUROSUR, which became operational on Dec 2, predicts a key role for Frontex in creating a border control coordinator. It initially involves 18 member states, and aims to gradually achieve increased intelligence sharing, improved situational awareness, increased surveillance capacity, search and rescue missions, and integration of third countries security and law enforcement systems.

Human rights groups have circulated evidence in the last few days indicating that Greece, Italy and Egypt illegally detain and push back Syrian refugees.

The reports were issued by the German refugee aid organisation Pro Asyl, Medici per i Diritti Umani – MEDU (Doctors for Human Rights – Italy), the Italian human rights lawyers Association for Legal Studies on Migration (ASGI), and Human Rights Watch

The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, has also expressed worries about serious indications of violations of the non-refoulement principle in international law – which means that nobody should be sent to a country where he or she will be at risk of persecution – in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Greece.

On Nov.19, the European Commission publicly warned Greece and Bulgaria that turning Syrian refugees back at the border is illegal.

Pro Asyl circulated a detailed report on Nov. 7 based on interviews with 90 people who claimed to have been pushed back by the Greek security services since October 2012. The interviews were carried out between October 2012 and September 2013 in Germany, Greece and Turkey.

Most of the victims are refugees from Syria, but the interviewees also included people from Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, who are likely to be persons in need of international protection.

The violations of international law and denial of refugee rights appear to be organised and systematic and to take place in undercover operations. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses, Pro Asyl estimates that up to 2,000 refugees might have been turned back in the space of a year without being given the opportunity to request international protection or to challenge their illegal removal.

In many cases, the victims described how members of the security forces – sometimes wearing masks – pushed them back at gunpoint, seizing their belongings and often mistreating them.

The organisation claims that in the case of nine Syrian males turned back from the island of Farmakonisi, the refugees were held incommunicado and were beaten to an extent that could amount to torture.

“Until now there has been no response from the Greek government to the accusations,” Karl Kopp, Pro Asyl’s director of European affairs, told IPS. “The EU, Frontex [the EU border agency], and the governments of Germany and other countries also don’t acknowledge their complicity in this human rights scandal.

“The EU demanded and financed measures to deter refugees in the Evros and Aegean regions [in Greece]. Frontex operates in basically all areas where push-backs take place,” Kopp said.

On Nov. 12, the UNHCR requested clarification from the Greek government regarding strong evidence suggesting it had organised a massive push-back of 150 Syrians that day, including many families with children.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva that “UNHCR received information from villagers of the group being detained and transported in police vehicles to an unknown location, although they have not been transferred to a reception centre. Their current whereabouts is unknown to us.” The agency asked the Greek authorities to investigate their fate.

The refugees crossed into Greece across the northeast border of Evros in the early hours of the morning that day, before they were apprehended by police. A UNHCR team visited the site that evening.

On Nov. 13, MEDU and ASGI published their own report denouncing push-backs of Syrians to Greece from Italian ports. From April to September this year, interviews were carried out with 66 young people who were turned back after their attempt to reach Italy, and 102 illegal returns were registered this way by MEDU.

Loredana Leo, a lawyer who belongs to ASGI, told IPS that most of the people in question were asylum-seekers.

“When they arrived to the Italian harbours after a risky journey, most of them were unable to declare their age or request international protection due to the lack of translators; some of them suffered violence at the hands of the Italian authorities and most of them were not identified.”

In the next few days, ASGI is preparing to take Italy and Greece to the European Court of Human Rights, according to Leo, “for violations of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

Human Rights Watch also warned this month about the policy of detention and coercive returns of refugees that the Egyptian government appears to have put in place.

Up to 1,500 refugees from Syria, including at least 400 Palestinians and 250 children as young as two months old, have been locked up for weeks and sometimes months in Egypt. HRW said the refugees are held indefinitely until they are deported.

The U.S.-based rights watchdog also deplored that authorities advise refugees to leave the country, telling them that their only way to avoid detention is to return to Lebanon or Syria.

According to the organisation “more than 1,200 of the detained refugees, including about 200 Palestinians, have been coerced to depart, including dozens who have returned to Syria.”

The UNHCR is calling for a global moratorium on any return of Syrians to neighbouring countries.

Egyptian authorities estimate 300,000 Syrians are in Egypt, with 125,000 of them registered with the UNHCR. And there are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria currently in Egypt, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA).

“Egypt is leaving hundreds of Palestinians from Syria with no protection from Syria’s killing fields except indefinite detention in miserable conditions,” said Joe Stork, HRW deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Egypt should immediately release those being held and allow UNHCR to give them the protection they are due under international law.”

The reports on the unlawful detention and deportation of Syrian refugees have appeared at a time of dramatically deteriorating conditions for displaced people in Syria and neighbouring countries.

According to recent reports, some refugees from Syria are selling their kidneys to human organ trafficking networks or selling teenage daughters or sisters, out of desperation.

Migrants picked up by the Greek coastal guard in the Mediterranean just in time after destroying their boat to make sure they get arrested. Credit: Nikos Pilos/IPS.

By Apostolis Fotiadis and Claudia Ciobanu
ATHENS/WARSAW, Jan 11 2013 (IPS)

Publicly funded research is paying towards security systems that the EU is inviting major multinationals to put together to keep unwanted migrants out.

The new EU approach to border security started to be implemented in 2004 with the setting up of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP). This went on to become a part of the EU’s 7^th Framework Research Programme (FP7) under the current seven-year EU budget for 2007-2013.

The ESRP and FP7 have been increasingly used to finance research for the development of EUROSUR and ‘Smart Borders’ – two critical measures to toughen EU borders.

EUROSUR is the European External Border Surveillance System meant to enhance cooperation between border control agencies of EU member states and to promote surveillance of EU’s external borders by Frontex, the EU border agency.

‘Smart Borders’ will put in place an ‘Entry-Exit System’ (EES) to identify visa over-stayers, and establish a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP) to enable pre-vetted individuals to cross borders faster. The system would rely heavily on use of biometrics and on the collection of a huge database of personal information.

Major weapons and security equipment manufacturers have been members from the start of boards advising the European Commission on research to be financed from ESRP and FP7.

According to ‘Borderline’, a critical study of the EU’s new border surveillance and control system published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, the corporations Finmeccanica, Thales, EADS (a European corporation including Airbus, Astrium, Cassidian and Eurocopter), and Sagem, as well as industry lobby groups have been members of successive European Security Research advisory boards, alongside Frontex and national border control authorities.

In 2006, the European Security Research Advisory Board was co-chaired by an EADS director Markus Hellenthal, who then went on to work for Thales.

In 2007, the European Security Research and Innovation Forum brought industry and European policy makers together again, this time to create a 20-year vision for the ESRP, according to the Borderline report. This ‘Working Forum 3’ was chaired by Frontex, with Italian producer Finmeccanica as Rapporteur.

The Forum developed the integrated borders management concept and advised that the development of affordable equipment for this task be a priority for EU member states.

According to the European Commission, industry was not predominant on these boards: the FP7 advisory group, the EC wrote in an email response to IPS, included representatives from the German and Polish civil protection services, national authorities, universities and research institutes, and the Israeli Red Cross.

But companies on the advisory board benefited from the security research funds from FP7 programme. These funds allocated significant sums to EUROSUR and to the ‘Smart Borders’ development.

PERSEUS (Protection of European Seas and Borders through the intelligent use of surveillance) worth 43.6 million euros is implemented by EADS and Boeing subsidiaries among others; OPARUS (Open Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Surveillance System), worth 1.4 million euros, has as its beneficiaries Sagem, BAE Systems, IAI and two Thales subsidiaries; SEABILLA (Sea Border Surveillance) worth 15.5 million euros benefits Thales, Sagem and BAE subsidiaries.

Approximately 200 million euros were allocated to “intelligent surveillance and border security” from FP7. The security branches of major producers such as Thales, BAE, IAI or EADS usually benefited from these funds, in partnership with research institutes among other actors.

As the research projects were being implemented, Frontex has been creating opportunities for national border control authorities, European Commission representatives and industry players to meet routinely and to exchange views on what equipment may be necessary to member states to implement EUROSUR and ‘Smart Borders’.

“We do not do any research ourselves,” Edgar Beugels, Director of Research and Development at Frontex told IPS on the sidelines of a business-end users conference on ‘Smart Borders’ in September in Warsaw.

“We rely on research done by others – international research agencies, industry, universities, member states – we try to find out what they are doing and pass this to our end users (national border authorities and the Commission). Meanwhile, we collect a wish list from end users and transfer that back to the research community.”

At the Warsaw event, national authorities spoke about their border control plans in the main conference room while companies presented technology suited for those plans on the sidelines. Apart from such exhibitions, Frontex – which is the coordinator for EUROSUR – organises demonstrations where bigger equipment can be tested.

Frontex spokespersons interviewed by IPS did not deny that ideas for research projects submitted later to FP7 could be born during the conferences they sponsor, but said the agency does not play an active role in this process.

Responding to questions from IPS whether convergence between industry and the Commission on security equipment research and promotion and acquisitions by member states constitutes a conflict of interest, the European Commission said: “Industry representatives are quintessential for a technology oriented theme such as the Security Theme. It is not possible to get an expertise on the technical feasibility of a research project without industry representation.

“The implementation of a research project is not feasible without a company that can turn the theoretical analysis into a functioning technology,” stated the office of Marco Malacarne, head of Security Research and Industry in the Directorate General Enterprise at the European Commission, in a written response to IPS. “Initiating security research without technological partners would be an inexcusable waste of public money.”

But others doubt that this link between EU institutions and business is useful or necessary. “What we are witnessing here is an unholy alliance between business interests and political hardliners,” Ska Keller, member of the European Parliament told IPS. “Surveillance technology is the wrong answer to migration challenges. The way forward is not drones but improved, Europe-wide standards for asylum seekers and more solidarity and burden-sharing among member states.”

The European Commission clarified in a letter to IPS that the way Frontex is involved in the creation of EUROSUR and the promotion of market ready security equipment is entirely within the limits of European legislation.

The industry’s participation in the new border regime does not have a military aspect, the Commission letter says. Instead of any conflict of interest in the convergence of the industry with the Commission and Frontex over the development and production of security-oriented equipment, the Commission sees a legal obligation of the European Union to support its industry (although some of the companies are not entirely or at all European).

The full EU response to an earlier draft of this report can be read here.

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