The trend of migrants being chased away from Europe’s external borders without giving them a chance to tell their story – so-called pushbacks – continued into 2021. A European coalition of civil society organizations, Protecting Rights at Borders (PRAB), counted almost twelve thousand this year.
Also read: How pushing back migrants across Europe’s external border became practice
It is the first year that PRAB has counted the number of pushbacks against migrants on the fringes of Europe. Thousands of pushbacks have already taken place in previous years; that’s how the British newspaper counted The Guardian in 2020 forty thousand illegally banned asylum seekers. Several people can be pushed across the border in one pushback.
The area where most pushbacks take place is no longer the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey. The Balkans is now the region where by far the most migrants are pushed back, according to PRAB. Between July and November of this year alone, 6,200 cases have been documented there.
One difference with 2020 is that European authorities consider the pushbacks more normal, lawyers, political scientists and human rights activists tell NRC. A salient example of this was a tweet from European Council President Charles Michel on 10 November this year. At that time, EU member state Poland had to contend with dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko from neighboring Belarus, who cynically sent refugees to the Polish border to destabilize the EU. Poland sent these refugees back with no chance of applying for asylum, under Michel’s approving eye: “Full EU solidarity with Poland.”
‘Erosion of the standards’
Amnesty International’s European office deputy director Massimo Moratti calls the standardization of pushbacks an “erosion of standards”. The pushbacks, he says, have been going on for some time. “But this year we see a new low. In Croatia there is even talk of torturing migrants. Nobody is watching it and nobody is doing anything about it.”
According to political scientist Maurice Stierl of the University of Sheffield, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who insisted on a stricter approach to refugees, has had his way. “The European Commission estimates that militarizing the external borders is something the majority of European citizens want. Under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, the rhetorical balancing act on migration is no longer necessary.”
Last week, Orbán announced that he does not care about a critical ruling by the European Court of Justice about the Hungarian treatment of asylum seekers.
By turning a blind eye to pushbacks, something bigger is also at stake, Stierl says: international law is being eroded. “It is precisely in the border regions that international law must apply, because it is so lawless there.”
Standing practice page 12-13
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 28, 2021
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