The scenes of hundreds if not thousands of migrants desperately trying to cross borders into Europe and secure access to the Eurotunnel premises at Calais have been deeply shocking.
This is not because they disclose any significant problem concerning ‘border control’ which is quite manageable, and will be managed. It is because the vivid spectacle of human beings in search of safety and a better life scurrying past armed guards and scrambling perilously over fences has brought home what ‘fortress Europe’ and ‘Keep Out’ Britain really involves.
These scenes shock because they are an affront to the self-image of British and European society as a civilised and tolerant community which is respectful of human dignity. They also present a stark challenge to the legal expression of these ‘core values’ in both domestic immigration law and procedure and in the international asylum and humanitarian treaty framework.
Year on year, immigration and asylum law and procedure in the United Kingdom has become meaner and harsher, compromising even the reduced promises this country offers to human beings in drastic circumstances. Staff and students in the Kent Law Clinic at the University of Kent have provided a small legal advice and representation service to migrants and asylum seekers for many years. Over the last five years we have seen the reduction of legal protection and remedies available to migrants. We have seen the withdrawal of legal aid, increased application fees and court fees, cuts in court provision, and the reduction of access to remedies provided by the law. On an international level, the terms of existing treaties and conventions no longer take into account the conditions from which migrants are fleeing.
The situations in the Mediterranean, in Calais and on other borders are dramatic expressions of the consequences of war, disorder and extreme poverty across the globe combining with tightening restrictions on the free movement of people.
All of this shows an urgent need for a fresh look at what we as human beings owe to those from other parts of the world.
It is important to note how Europe’s own noble aim of free movement of European workers is itself under threat as economic decline exacerbates sharp differences in living standards between the EU Member States. In the recent UK election campaign the political parties vied with each other in proposing measures to restrict EU migrants’ access to public services. Furthermore, the UK is not the only country putting up barriers even against other EU nationals crossing borders to look for work.
In this context, it is not surprising that the countries facing the largest arrivals of non-EU migrants are receiving no support from the rest of the EU, or that Italy’s search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean are not supported, or that few other EU countries have been prepared to provide financial assistance, let alone accept quotas of migrants. This Europe-wide refusal to assist Greece and Italy in providing an acceptable service to ‘their’ asylum-seekers even conflicts with a 2011 judgment of the European Court of Human Rights that forcing an asylum-seeker to return to Greece to claim asylum risked breaching that person’s Article 3 right not to face torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.
Looking beyond Europe’s problems, what we are seeing in Calais, as on other borders within Europe and between Europe and Asia and north Africa, are examples of the desperation of hundreds of thousands of people who have given up hope that they can make a reasonable life in their own countries. Many may have valid claims under the UN Refugee Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights that they would face torture, persecution or inhuman treatment if returned to their own country.
In truth, however, many others may not technically have an asylum claim even though their lives at home are equally intolerable. Droughts and other environmental disasters do not count, nor do the Conventions recognise extreme poverty or starvation as grounds for asylum. The narrowness of existing Conventions enables European governments and others to draw a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’- between the ‘genuine asylum-seeker’ and the ‘economic migrant’. This leads to the grotesque spectacle of politicians declining to provide assistance to migrants drowning in the sea, and even proposing to sink their boats. Migrants who are camped desperately on either side of European borders can expect little better.
The so-called ‘Calais migrant crisis’ serves as a reminder that those of us in the ‘first world’ should strive to do justice to human beings beyond our borders, and perhaps identify why it is that we find it so difficult to respect a universal human desire to make a better life for ourselves and our families.
John Fitzpatrick