February 29, 2020 / By mobanmarket
The battle over the EU’s migration policy has been a war of words as well as policies and politics. Even after months of summitry and scaremongering, a lot of people are confused about what the words actually mean.
Are people being relocated or resettled? What’s the difference between a political hotspot and a migration hotspot? What exactly is refoulement and how can one push back against it?
From “Wir schaffen das” to “all terrorists are migrants,” the migration debate has been prone to political spin — and it is being won by those who manage to get public opinion on their side. As the debate heats up ahead of yet another summit, leaders will try to balance political concerns with legal implications. But it will also be important to get the terminology right.
Here are seven dirty words on migration that could also turn out to be legal tripwires for the EU and its members:
What the EU glossary says: The EU’s system of refugee support centers involves “dedicated hotspot teams from all the Agencies concerned [Frontex, EASO and Europol] to provide comprehensive support in dealing with mixed migratory flows.”
Translation: Hotspots are essentially identification centers, set up at Europe’s external border points with the highest levels of asylum-seekers. Read: Greece and Italy. So far eight have been set up, though progress on getting them up-and-running was slower than anticipated and required lots of goading from the Commission. “It is totally new and specific to the European context. It is not used anywhere else,” said Philippe De Bruycker, professor in migration at the European University Institute.
Sample soundbite: “Four-and-a-half hotspots [are] fully operational” — Nikos Xydakis, Greek minister for European affairs, defending Greece’s record on asylum-seekers’ reception in late February
What the glossary says: Detention is the “confinement (i.e. deprivation of liberty) of an applicant for international protection by a Member State within a particular place, where the applicant is deprived of their personal liberty.”
Translation: Detention centers are built to keep migrants locked up either when awaiting a decision on their asylum request or when awaiting return when their claims have been dismissed. Every EU country has them, but not every country uses them with the same purpose. Keeping asylum-seekers locked up is legal, but EU countries have strict rules on the conditions of the confinement. They can’t detain asylum-seekers “for the sole reason that he or she is an applicant,” EU rules state, adding that it’s a last-resort measure and should be “as short as possible.”
Sample soundbite: “All measures must be taken to ensure irregular migrants’ effective return, including use of detention as a legitimate measure of last resort.” — EU summit conclusions from October 8, 2015
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What the EU glossary says: Nothing. The term is not in the official glossary — arguably because Europe’s leaders want to avoid any discussion on the issue.
Translation: “Pushback” policy stops asylum-seekers at borders and forcibly turns them around to return to the country they came from. Pushback is being talked about increasingly by hardline opponents of open-door refugee policies. But legally it’s on shaky ground — to say the least. In 2012, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy’s pushback policy on boat refugees coming from Libya breached international law, including the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those documents, and the laws that followed them, defined a person’s rights to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. Countries have an obligation to process asylum requests, or they could be at risk of sending back people who have a legitimate claim to protection.
Sample soundbite: “We should have closed the borders from the start and done pushbacks” — Bart De Wever, leader of Belgium’s largest party N-VA, when outlining his plan to close Europe’s doors to refugees
… Or rather “non-refoulement.”
What the glossary says: The principle of non-refoulement “prohibits States from returning refugees in any manner whatsoever to countries or territories in which their lives or freedom may be threatened on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
Translation: It’s the opposite of “pushback” (refouler in French). The principle of non-refoulement is supposed to prevent persecuted people from being sent back into the arms of their persecutors — generally a state or regime. If a Syrian opposition member is sent back to Damascus, he is “refouled” and at the mercy of those threatening his life. And that’s a no-go in international law. The term has been thrown into the debate in recent days by critics of the EU-Turkey deal, who say it will result in refugees being sent back into danger.
Sample soundbite: Calling Turkey a safe country “undermines the individual right to have asylum claims fully and fairly processed and may result in individuals being subsequently deported to their country of origin — in violation of the principle of non-refoulement” — Amnesty International’s reaction to the EU-Turkey plan
What the glossary says: Resettlement is “the transfer, on a request from the UNHCR and based on their need for international protection, of a third-country national or stateless person, from a third country to a Member State.”
Translation: It’s the asylum equivalent of an airlift: Refugees are screened in conflict zones or non-EU countries — by the UN’s refugee agency — and granted asylum by EU countries. The refugees are then transferred by plane to EU host countries. The idea of resettling refugees was part of the Commission’s big push on migration last summer, but has yet to make any real impact: EU countries agreed in July to resettle 22,000 refugees, and so far have managed to transfer about 4,500.
Sample soundbite: When asked in early December whether a deal was in the making with Turkey that included resettling refugees in the EU, European Council President Donald Tusk declared, “There is no majority in Europe to win when it comes to resettlement.” The concept now makes up a big part of the EU-Turkey deal he is trying to bring in for a landing.
What the glossary says: The transfer of refugees “from the EU Member State which granted them international protection to another EU Member State where they will be granted similar protection” or of asylum-seekers “from the EU Member State which is responsible for examining their application to another EU Member State where their applications for international protection will be examined.”
Translation: It’s a burden-sharing effort that involves moving refugees or asylum-seekers from the country where they arrived to … somewhere else. In the EU case it means transferring them from Greece and Italy. Relocation is resettlement’s big brother: Last summer, EU countries pledged to relocate a total of 160,000 asylum-seekers now in Greece and Italy. So far, they’ve managed to relocate just under 1,000 refugees, or 0.6 percent of the total.
Sample soundbite: “The relocation mechanism is linked to the hotspot approach” — Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in an answer to the European Parliament in February, seamlessly using two dirty words in one sentence
What the glossary says: EU officials prefer the term “irregular” when referring to migrants who have entered the bloc without proper authorization. The term “illegal” is used sparingly in the official glossary — as in “illegal stay.”
Translation: But politicians use the word “illegal” all the time to describe migrants who are not eligible for asylum protection. The key question that still rages through the migration debate is: When is a migrant illegal? “It is a longstanding discussion,” said De Bruycker. “Some people prefer to say irregular,” he said. “Technically, asylum-seekers can find themselves illegally — or irregularly — in an EU country when they are undocumented. But at the same time, it is not illegal for them to arrive undocumented.” Plowing through the European Council agreements and EU leaders’ talking points, irregular seems to have the upper hand. But that prudence seems to fade more quickly when looking at national debates and less mainstream figures.
Sample soundbite: “The days of uncontrolled immigration and illegal entry can’t continue just like that. Paris changes everything” — Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder, in an interview with Welt am Sonntag, two days after the terror attacks in Paris in November 2015
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