Legal Confusions and Political Calculations: The European Refugee Crisis
The old Athens Airport, Ellinikon International, was opened in 1938, and after serving the needs of the German Luftwaffe during the Nazi occupation of Greece, closed in 2001 when a new airport was built for the Olympics which Greece hosted. Today it sits abandoned –or it did, until the refugees arrived.
On an early Friday morning in March, we approached the grey shaped non-descript institutional buildings at about 10 am. They could have been part of a warehouse, a factory, a military base. The first thing I noticed was a young boy of 9 or 10, who together with his father, was sweeping the front steps of a room inside the flat building that must have housed them. On the other side of the lot, were rows of tents of all colors such as hikers and campers use. Ahead of us, on the balcony of what was once the airport’s main terminal, hung a clothes-line, extending the whole length of the building, with multi-colored shirts, pants, skirts, and scarves waving around in the wind. One could have encountered such a scene of everyday normalcy on any camping site in the world.
Except that nothing is normal when you are a refugee. Everyday life, driven by the needs of the body, asserts itself in ways that lets you take nothing for granted — whether you will wake up in the same room or tent the next morning; whether you will have access to bathrooms; whether there will be a doctor to tend to your wounds or illnesses. Suspended between the home that you have lost and the uncertain destination that awaits you, your sense of time is also warped: should one wake up the children? Ah yes, but there is no school or playground for them to go to, is there?
The seemingly peaceful scene I witnessed on a recent trip to Greece at the invitation of the Harvard Business School Club of Greece and Solidarity Now (an NGO sponsored by the Soros Foundation) was extremely deceptive. Despite the noteworthy efforts of the Greek government and people, and many other civil society groups across Europe, a continent of respect for human rights and international law is fast becoming a continent of failed administrative logic, bureaucratic absurdities, and national egotisms, behind which hide right-wing politicians and nativist demagogues. The agreement concluded with Turkey and the EU on March 17–19, and ratified by the 28 EU states, is most likely contrary to international law and has already drawn criticism from the UNHCR, Médècins sans Frontières, Amnesty International UK.
The status of refugees and asylum seekers who enter the territory of the European Union is governed by the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and its Protocols of 1967. Concluded at the end of WWII, the 1951 Convention defines “a refugee as someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” The 1967 Protocols removed restrictions on the definition of a Convention refugee that were confined to the European Continent and to events occurring prior to January 1, 1951.
The Convention and its Protocol concretize further Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution and the right of non-refoulement. “The principle of non-refoulement is so fundamental that no reservations or derogations may be made to it. It provides that no one shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee against his or her will, in any manner whatsoever, to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom.” This right is an individual right and a refugee’s application for asylum must be examined for each individual, though the reasons for seeking asylum often arise out of hostile conditions in the country of origin and as a consequence of persecution in virtue of belonging to a certain race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc.
According to many estimates, there are currently 53,000 refugees and asylum seekers blocked inside Greece, which they had expected to be only a country of passage to Germany, Sweden, Austria, Norway — to the strong welfare-states of northern Europe where they believed their chances for a better life will be more assured than economically struggling Greece. Turkey, by contrast, is home to 3.2 million refugees of many more nationalities besides Syrians. According to the most recent figures released by the Turkish government, there are approximately 2.75 million Syrians in the country, only about 270,000 of whom are housed in camps along the Syria-Turkish border. Reports recently released by Amnesty International UK are suggesting that, in fact, Turkey may have violated the principle of “non-refoulement” by extraditing about 100 Syrian refugees back to Syria.
Furthermore, Turkey is not party to the 1967 Protocol of the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, meaning that it only recognizes as a “convention refugee” those originating from Europe and prior to 1951. The status of refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and displaced persons is governed by a Directive named the “Temporary Protection Directive.” (“Geçici Koruma Yönetmeligi,” adopted in 2013) Whether this Turkish administrative measure is compatible with current standards of international refugee protection theory and practice, is the contested point.
According to the agreement with Turkey which went into effect on April 4th, each refugee arriving in Greece from Turkey after March 21st, 2016 will be returned, while Europe (mainly Germany) will accept a Syrian refugee currently in the camps in Turkey and duly registered with the UNHCR and the government. The rest will need to go to the end of the line. Those refugees accepted to be relocated to European host countries will presumably be flown out of Turkey — just as they could have been flown out of Greece and much earlier without being subject to the barbed wire fences, police dogs and water cannons of the border guards and police along the now blocked Balkan passages in Macedonia, Hungary, Slovakia, etc.
Yet the reason why those refugees who do not wish to stay in Greece, and who are seeking passage to other European countries, are not being air-lifted instead of having to travel on foot to host countries is the EU’s so-called “Dublin agreement,” according to which a refugee’s application for asylum must be processed in “the first country of entry.” Devised to deal with the phenomenon of “refugees in orbit” in the 1990’s, that is, with refugees who submitted asylum applications in more than one country, this agreement has turned countries of the Mediterranean into open-air holding pens.
By agreeing to accept refugees carrying Syrian and Iraqi passports as asylees (after an intake interview), Angela Merkel’s government has in fact abrogated the Dublin principle that the first country of entry must be the one in which the asylum application is processed. If this is so, then why not airlift the rest of the refugees from Greece to Germany?
Unable to face their own daemons of racism, Islamophobia, human rights violations, and sheer egotism, European leaders instead have chosen to shift the burden to Turkey. Boats carrying refugees to Turkey are now aided by the NATO fleet’ navigational devices. The asylum seeker is now being treated not only as if s/he were a criminal who needs to be detained; he or she has become the enemy who needs accompanying by military force.
The logic of the EU-Turkey agreement is to relieve Greece minimally of the burden of newcomers this summer, help reduce political pressure upon the government of Angela Merkel after her set-backs in Germany’s recent regional elections, and discourage future refugees from attempting the crossing across the Aegean Sea.
But refugees whose needs are desperate have already started exploring other routes of passage across North Africa, via Libya to Italy, and to a lesser extent, from Morocco to Spain. They are even moving across northern Russia, crossing the route into Finland.
Emerging out of the ashes of the Holocaust and with the painful memory of refugees who not only were not granted asylum, but who, in the words of Hannah Arendt, were eventually rendered “superfluous peoples,” the European Union is today facing an existential predicament that puts in question its very raison d’etre.
Although this crisis has revealed the Achilles’ Heel of the European Union, let us admit that refugees coming from war-torn regions of the world in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria as well as Eritrea, Somalia and the Sudan are not only Europe’s responsibility. The United States has failed to respect the “Pottery Barn” principle once so clearly articulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell: “You break it, you own it.” We have caused much of the military chaos in these countries by our interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
Mired in an ugly election campaign, the United States is simply failing to live up to its moral and political obligations to the refugees. We are also letting our European allies down by underestimating the threat this situation poses to the future of the EU itself. Blessed by the vastness of the Ocean between us and Europe and the MENA region we remain disgracefully smug watching the human misery unfold on other shores!
Seyla Benhabib
Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University
