A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe by Fekete Liz

Author:Fekete, Liz [Fekete, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2009-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Detention and Deportation

5

THE DEPORTATION MACHINE

We live in an age in which the rich industrialised nations pronounce on human rights abuses abroad while failing to live up to their own standards at home, particularly in relation to obligations under international law. But whereas the abrogation of international law that arose from the ‘war on terror’ has generated much attention, the degree of illegality that flows from the (undeclared) ‘war on refugees’ is less keenly observed. The war on terror has undermined the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War; the war on refugees has undermined the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Both wars have eroded international conventions outlawing torture, cruel and degrading treatment or other punishment.

Though the 1951 Refugee Convention is under threat from a variety of directions, some of the most serious abuses of its articles and principles result from the introduction of the EU deportation programme, with its target-based system for removals and its reification of failed asylum seekers as commodities to be parcelled and dispatched out of Europe. 1 It is a programme that eats away at a political culture that professes respect for human rights. As such, the effects of Europe’s deportation policies 2 today parallel the plight of refugees during the Second World War. In her consideration of the plight of refugees during and after that war, Hannah Arendt observed that ‘the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them’. 3 The body of international human rights law that was created after 1945 was developed to meet this need – but there is a pressing need today for stronger mechanisms to guarantee that these rights are available and effective for non-citizens, to oblige receiving states to treat the right to asylum as sacrosanct, and to apply the law impartially.

Seventy years after the Holocaust, stateless refugees are being left practically unprotected, ‘expelled from humanity’, reduced to ‘bare life’ ‘unpeopled’, 4 as the protections of international law are gradually eroded. This chapter examines the mechanics of the EU deportation programme, which violates not only the basic principles of the Refugee Convention, particularly that of non-refoulement (no return to danger), but numerous other instruments of international law; and the way that civil servants, immigration officials and police officers are being turned into automatons. 5 Under the spotlight here are collective deportations carried out through military-style operations and the brutality involved in individual forced deportations. The EU expulsion policy necessitates the maintenance of a vast carceral system, and this chapter describes what takes place at the zones d’attente at international airports, detention centres at maritime borders, removal centres on the outskirts of European cities, and even further afield, as member states extend the detention estate into Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal. In this prison-asylum complex (a mutation of the ordinary prison system) migrants and failed asylum seekers are warehoused.

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