Migrants board a truck at the border post in the village of Assamaka (Niger) to head north to Algeria (archive image). © Jerome Delay/dpa
With a lot of money, the EU is trying to prevent people in need from seeking a better life in Europe. But this does not work, makes the EU susceptible to blackmail and causes new problems.
This article is IPPEN. MEDIA in the course of a cooperation with the Security.Table Professional Briefing – it was first published by Security.Table on May 16, 2023.
Berlin – Largely unnoticed by the European public, a humanitarian catastrophe is currently taking place in the Nigerien city of Assamaka: thousands of refugees from various sub-Saharan countries are stranded here. Their supply is poor, the place is overwhelmed with the people who wanted to go to Europe. The situation has hardly improved for months, confirms the organization Doctors Without Borders when asked.
Assamaka, in the border region with Algeria and Mali, is just one example of the EU's outsourced responsibility for asylum seekers and migrants. It stands for a momentous trend: the actual borders of the EU are increasingly far away from the geographical ones. Third countries, which are often known for human rights violations, deter migrants and refugees on behalf of the EU.
It is no longer about the apparently unreformable Dublin III system, according to which the EU state in which refugees first arrive is responsible. The concept of camps for refugees at the external borders, which is currently being pushed by the German Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, would create an outer border ring in front of the EU, which would prevent those seeking protection from entering the EU.
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"Attempts are being made to keep people's suffering as far away from Europe as possible – whatever the cost. However, this will only create more suffering and flight instead of tackling the causes," Green MEP Erik Marquardt told Table.Media. "There are strong forces in Europe that want to abolish the right of asylum in principle. They are always offering new bogus solutions instead of concentrating on the essentials. In the end, there is no way around solidarity in Europe, protecting people in need and combating the causes of flight."
Refugees in the EU: Most of them come from Syria and Afghanistan
In 2022, around 962,000 people applied for asylum in the EU, 218,000 of them in Germany. Refugees from Ukraine are not included in these statistics. This year, there could be more if the trend of the first few months continues. The main countries of origin of the applicants in Germany are Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. In any case, Turkey plays an important bouncer role in EU migration policy. And it knows how to use it for its own interests, such as extorting higher payments from Brussels by opening borders and also continuing its violent policy against the Kurds in northern Syria.
The legal and political scientist at the University of Kassel, Maximilian Pichl, therefore judges clearly: "The EU-Turkey deal has failed." He also points out that Turkey has not fully implemented the Geneva Refugee Convention. E
Safe countries of origin: Greens in particular reject expansion
Transferring tasks to another tool of the EU, other states and regions is the concept of safe third countries. In addition to the EU members, eight other countries are currently considered safe third countries for Germany. Above all, the CDU/CSU, but also politicians of the SPD, are calling for an extension, including to Georgia, Moldova, Morocco, Tunisia and India.
From the governing coalition comes from the Greens the clearest rejection. However, the resolution paper on the refugee summit of 10 May states: "The German government will intensify talks with important countries of origin in order to cooperate with them on the readmission of their nationals."
However, legal scholar Pichl warns: "There is no functioning asylum system in Tunisia. The EU Commission is looking for ways out of this dilemma and wants to lower the standards for when a third country is considered safe. As a result, refugee law standards are being abandoned. That's why I don't think it's possible to have a migration agreement based on the rule of law."
Migration: Is the EU sabotaging its own value system?
Migration researchers also see the development of a de facto restriction on filing an asylum application on European soil as a danger to the EU itself. "We must not forget that the Union is not only a political and economic community, but is also essentially based on idealistic values," says the Austrian cultural and migration researcher Judith Kohlenberger, who deals with the contradictory nature of EU asylum and migration policy in her book "The Flight Paradox". "However, the EU can hardly credibly represent these values anymore, neither externally nor internally. Countries in the Global South are watching very closely how 'the West' behaves towards them."
The examples of Turkey and Niger, but also the current UN report on the catastrophic human rights situation for refugees in Libya, show that the EU cannot prevent people from fleeing emergencies, despite the considerable financial outlay. These agreements not only make the EU susceptible to blackmail, they also create new problems on the ground. This is illuminated, for example, by the study published at the end of March by the Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research using the Nigerien city of Agadez as an example.
EU isolation against refugees creates new problems
As with Libya, the EU has also intensified cooperation with Niger to combat smugglers. For more than ten years, EUCAP has also been an EU police training mission, which is currently headed by Berlin police officer Antje Pittelkau. However, developments in Niger so far show that the criminalisation of transit migration only makes the business more lucrative for the smugglers. The prices for travel around the country are rising because more bribes have to be paid. A similar development is also known from Libya.
The emergency situation in Assamaka is a consequence of the destabilisation of Mali and the harsh migration policies of the EU and Niger in recent years. The authors of the PRIF study, Sarah Horváth and Regine Schwab, therefore conclude: "Migration policy also requires the normalization of migration as well as regulated pathways for intra- and extra-African migration." (by Viktor Funk)