[ad_1]
Nothing makes more sense for the political classes than early demagoguery when things go wrong. Granted, the UK may well ramp up the number of vaccinations and become more and more fearless about it, but there are still good reasons to distract voters. The coronavirus continues to annoy; the economy continues to suffer. In February, the Office of Statistics revealed that the UK economy had shrunk by 9.9%. The last time such a contraction occurred was in 1709, when a 13% contraction was suffered as a result of the Great Frost which lasted for three devastating months.
As Brexit Britain feels lonely, it’s time to resort to traditional targets of dismemberment in the 2016 exit campaign: the asylum seeker, the refugee and anyone helping with this. company. And the best person to do so is Home Secretary Priti Patel, who presented the government’s new immigration plan on March 24.e. It has three objectives with a global punitive theme “to better protect and support those who genuinely need asylum”. The authenticity of this need will be facilitated by deterring ‘illegal entry into the UK, thereby breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger’. Those who are “not entitled to be” in the UK will also be more easily “deported”.
It is in the nature of such policies to cover up the punitive element by extolling the virtues. “The UK accepted more refugees under planned resettlement programs than any other country in Europe during the period 2015-2019 – the fourth-highest resettlement program in the world after the United States, Canada and Australia, ”the policy statement read. “The UK also hosted 29,000 people under the refugee family reunification program between 2015 and 2019. More than half of them were children.”
This self-praise ignores the embarrassing fact that the UK received fewer asylum applications than European states such as France and Germany in 2020. According to UNHCR, the two countries received four times the number in 2020. “The number of arrivals to the UK in 2020,” notes Helen O’Nions University, “was actually down 18% from the previous year.
However, it doesn’t take long to identify and inflate the threats: people crossing the Channel in their “small boats have reached record levels, with 8,500… arriving that way” in 2020. Grim accusations are made: 87% of those who arrived in the small boats were men. In 2019, 32,000 illegal attempts were made to enter the UK but were foiled in northern France while 16,000 illegal arrivals were detected in the UK.
The Interior Ministry deplores the rapid increase in asylum requests; decisions cannot be made “quickly”; “The number of cases is reaching unbearable levels.” Regardless of the United Nations Convention on Refugees and Human Rights: what matters is bureaucratic efficiency. To achieve this, Patel hopes “to prevent illegal arrivals from entering the asylum system immediately if they have passed through a safe country – like France”. It cannot be said that newcomers who do so “seek refuge from imminent peril”. Tougher penalties are also suggested for those helping with asylum. “Access to the UK asylum system should be based on need and not on the ability to pay smugglers.”
Much of what the Home Office does is nonsense. It involves a fantasy about a model, idealized asylum seeker: those with state documents from the persecuting state, clearly of the identifiable type, all morally sound. The darker reality requires deception as an indispensable part of the process. Not having papers makes the trip impossible. Alternative routes and means are therefore necessary.
The threat to relocate and refuse asylum seekers would also violate UK Human Rights Act 1998, obliging the state to prevent people from being returned to places where they risk torture, inhuman and degrading treatment or cruel and unusual punishment. . This principle is also an essential feature of the Refugee Convention.
The point of view of those who actually have more than a passing knowledge of the field is very different from that of Patel. Politely, some 454 UK immigration specialists told the Home Secretary in an open letter that she did not know what she was talking about. The new plan, for example, may contain 31 references, but “there is only one reference to research data, a research paper on refugee integration.” The undersigned academics suggest that Patel look deeper, as the proposed plans “not only circumvent international human rights law, but are also based on claims that are completely unfounded in any body of research evidence.”
The researchers also note that asylum seekers and refugees lack safe and legal routes, with countries in Europe, North America and Australasia having made “enormous efforts and massive spending in recent years. decades to close access to the right of asylum ”.
The inscriptions of the new plan resemble, too closely, the Australian approach to discrimination that has become an example of how to undermine asylum: an obsession with targeting those people who trafficked “gangs” and trade rackets. associates, simply code to target those fleeing persecution; distinguish the mode of arrival in order to demonize the fate of the asylum seeker; the ruling that, regardless of asylum claims, certain individuals would never be given safe haven because they chose to skip a phantom queue and not know their place.
The open letter also notes the “distinct and disturbing echoes” of Australia’s “temporary protection visa program and the defamation of people with no choice but to travel by irregular means to flee persecution and seek refuge.”
Another unsavory aspect of Britain’s shift in refugee policy to the Antipodean example can be captured by the possible use of offshore detention centers. Canberra relies on the liberal use of concentration camps at remote sites in the Pacific, centers of calculated cruelty that serve to destroy the wills of those whose governments have already done much to encourage their escape. The official justification is to kill asylum seekers with kindness: we saved you from almost certain drowning at sea, to lock you within the confines of legal purgatory. In the New Plan, we feel a touch of envy for him.
In October last year, it was revealed that the British Prime Minister’s Office was considering the detention of asylum seekers in places as diverse as Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the Foreign Office had been commissioned by Downing Street to “offer advice on possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru ”. Patel herself had flirted with the idea of establishing centers in Ascension and St Helena, although she had to be content with ill-suited military barracks on the mainland which facilitated the spread of COVID-19.
Alison Mountz, in The death of the asylum, makes much of this transformation of the island from a transit point to that of hostile confinement. Based on field research conducted on Lampedusa Island in Italy, Christmas Island in Australia, and the U.S. territories of Guam and Saipan, Mountz argues that “the strategic use of the islands to detain people in the quest for protection – to thwart human mobility through confinement – is part of death. asylum. Officials like Patel are happy to help.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne. E-mail: [email protected]
Source link
