Migrants, a Europe that builds walls instead of bridges

At least 86 people, including 35 children, they are dead on the night between 25 and 26 February in the strip of sea that bathes Steccato di Cutro, a town with 400 inhabitants in Calabria, between Crotone and Catanzaro.They had left Turkey aboard a precarious and overloaded boat, with the aim of reaching the European Union and in many cases reuniting with family members who had faced the horrors of the crossing before them.

The dozens of bodies brought back to shore by the waters confirm the failure of European - as well as Italian - policies for the management of migratory flows, excessively complicated already on paper and useless, then, in practice.It's from yesterday, March 28th relationship of the United Nations Human Rights Council which, in a three-year investigation, found "overwhelming evidence" that people stranded in Libya are being systematically tortured and forced into sexual slavery while trying to reach Europe.The report criticizes the European Union for “the support provided to the Libyan Coast Guard in terms of removals, pushbacks and interceptions”.“We are not saying that the EU and its member states committed these crimes.The point is that the support given aided and abetted the commission of crimes,” said one of the commission members, Chaloka Beyani.The Libyan authorities, “have received technical, logistical and monetary support from the European Union and its member states for the interception and repatriation of migrants among other things.”

Blocked by its internal divisions, the Union has long turned its back and postponed the moment when it will be necessary to deal with a situation that has become unsustainable.

The errors, flaws and falsehoods of the government's version of the Cutro massacre

A machine that doesn't work

Today the asylum policies of the European Union are summarized in Common European asylum system (CEAS), which however limits itself to regulating international protection, recognized when there are the conditions for the attribution of subsidiary protection or refugee status.From there, individual member states can move independently to manage reception procedures, creating an extremely fragmented system:“The European asylum system is 'common' only in a way of speaking,” explains a Blue suitcase Chiara Favilli, professor of European Union law at the University of Florence.

In 2020, the European Commission submitted a proposal of reform for the CEAS – defined as a “new beginning” – and last summer the representatives of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union they are committed to bring the changes into force by April 2024, before the end of the current legislature.The reform predicts six fundamental points, which are currently rather vague:optimize border control procedures, reform the Schengen code, improve relocation systems, attract talent, support international partnerships and focus on "flexibility and resilience" to "ensure a common and rapid reaction to the migration crisis".

No mention is made, however, of the introduction of new regular roads for the arrival of migrants, the lack of which is one of the main problems of the CEAS.

Missed reforms

In the eternal debate on the reform of European asylum policies, the elephant in the room is the need to reform the Dublin Regulation, which came into force in 1997 and has now reached its third, widely criticized version.

It is the document which establishes, among other things, that the country of first arrival of migrants is the one required to take care of their asylum applications, a mechanism which according to many places excessive responsibility on a few countries, such as Italy and Greece, which due to their geographical position they represent the obligatory entry point for hundreds of thousands of people every year.Despite many declarations in favor of a fair distribution of responsibilities, in more than twenty years the EU has never managed to find an alternative solution.

“There is no will among the member states to ensure that the Union manages immigration policies,” explains Favilli.“The Union is invoked when states need assistance to lighten their responsibilities, but then it is not allowed to develop a real policy, because it would mean reducing the power of individual governments”.

Over the years there have been various attempts to reform the Regulation, including one proposal approved by the European Parliament in 2017, but none were ever finalized due to disagreements between various member states.Luca Masera, professor of criminal law at the University of Brescia and member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration, explains to Blue suitcase that “in today's European context, discussions relating to the need to reform the Dublin Treaty remain more academic than real”.

Even the latest reform proposal presented in 2020 risks not meeting expectations:“It is a substantial package, but not very ambitious,” explained Favilli, underlining that many new projects relating to immigration in Europe are now being watered down by the awareness of the failures that have accumulated over the years.

Rescue or control?

Beyond the necessary reforms to the asylum system, the European Union's practical attempts to address the problem of deaths at sea have also proved unsuccessful.“The EU could organize search and rescue missions at sea, but this has never been done effectively,” Masera told Blue suitcase referring to operations such as Mare nostrum, launched by the Italian government in 2013, and the subsequent European-led Triton and Sophia.

“Mare Nostrum had as its institutional purpose the saving of lives at sea.The other European missions, such as Triton and Sophia, aimed above all at controlling and blocking unregulated access, to the detriment of effectiveness in managing rescue operations", explained the expert.As a result, both missions proved ineffective, especially due to the lack of resources made available.Again, “the European Union could do something, but the political will is lacking,” Masera said.

How to stop deaths at sea.Proposals for a different management of migratory flows

For once, then, the problem is not funds, given that the EU continues to invest significant sums in the management of migratory flows.The 2021-2027 budget he destined 9.9 billion euros to the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (Fami), more than triple compared to the 3.1 billion allocated for the period 2014-2020.63.5% of this money will be allocated to programs managed jointly by the EU and the Member States, while the remaining part will be managed directly by the European Union and intended for assistance operations in emergency situations, repatriations, and relocations, intended as "solidarity efforts".

The walls that already exist

In the gray area left by an overall inefficient system, individual EU member states are adopting individual policies to deal with migratory flows, putting national interests ahead of calls for solidarity.In some cases, the wide freedom left to the various governments and a weak opposition from the European Union have allowed the construction of real walls.

According to a relationship of the European Parliament, between 2014 and 2022 the walls present on European borders, both with external countries and within the Schengen area, went from 315 kilometers to 2,048 kilometers, based on two main reasons:limit migratory flows and fight terrorism.Today, 19 walls or physical barriers exist between the EU's borders, spread across 12 countries.

Just look at Viktor Orbán's Hungary, which has spent since 2015 over one billion euros to erect one barrier on the border with Serbia, complete with barbed wire and cameras, aimed at blocking the arrival of migrants trying to enter European territory by land.The initiative was applauded by various member countries, such as Austria and Lithuania, who would like to replicate it.For now, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the EU will not fund similar projects.“This is a small satisfaction, but politically the opposition has been very weak,” said Masera, however, stating that in fact the Union has not implemented concrete actions to block the creation of these walls.

Further south, they have also accumulated in recent years knownzie of illegal pushbacks carried out by Greece against migrants who tried to arrive in Europe by sea or by land, across the border with Turkey.The violations were so obvious that last June the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, he asked Greece to put an end to these practices, under penalty of loss or reduction of the funds provided by Brussels.

However, the numbers indicate that in many cases attempts to seal national borders are not leading to the desired results:second the last onesthe data of the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), in 2022 the 27 member countries of the Union, plus Switzerland and Norway, received 966 thousand asylum requests, 50% more than in 2021 and the highest number high since 2016, even net of the approximately 4 million people arriving from Ukraine who applied for temporary protection.

A “zero-asylum” Europe

Although in a less plastic way, without building barriers or physically preventing people from entering their territory, many other EU member states continue to work to make access procedures for migrants more difficult and tortuous.Italy is fully included among these, as recently demonstrated by the new "Code of Conduct" for ships of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). approved by the Meloni government last February, which deliberately complicates the procedures for carrying out search and rescue operations at sea.

The government's new strategy against NGOs saving lives at sea

Not far away, starting from 2015, Denmark has profoundly changed its asylum system, abandoning the goal of integrating refugees in favor of practices that encourage them to return to their country of origin as soon as possible.In 2021, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen he declared candidly that his government intends to reduce asylum requests to "zero", a not impossible objective considering that two years ago the country received only 1,547 applications, the lowest number since 1998 and just a tenth compared to 2016 figures.

Similar initiatives also find space outside the EU.In recent weeks, for example, a new proposal presented by the British government of Rishi Sunak to ban the landing of migrants crossing the English Channel has also caused discussion, with practices that the Home Secretary Suella Braverman herself he declared may be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Weak will

The European Union has demonstrated that it has the necessary means to manage migratory crises in a short time.The latest example comes from the war in Ukraine:in February 2022, when Russia invaded the country, the EU she immediately mobilized to provide people fleeing conflict with temporary protection, a status that guarantees, among other things, the possibility to move freely, live and work in EU countries while accessing medical care, banking services and the education system.As mentioned, today more than four million people they arrived in the EU from Ukraine, without this flow raising alarmism or xenophobic propaganda acts remotely comparable to those that we have been hearing for years against those who reach Europe from regions such as Africa or the Middle East.In 2021 the Union it was activated also to encourage the evacuation of thousands of people from Afghanistan, following the rapid withdrawal of US troops and the return to power of the Taliban.

The means to manage migrant people fleeing their countries exist, and have already been used in the past.Beyond the extraordinary measures implemented in response to sudden and limited emergencies, however, for years the lack of political will has been blocking the reform of the entire system.But a change of pace is now a necessity that can no longer be postponed.

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