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Germany - The refugees’ resistance to the Dublin Regulation

Freedom of choice against European borders

From more than one year now in Orianenplatz, the very centre of Berlin, refugees have been camping to claim for residence and right to the future. The administration’s attempts to find surface-solutions are obviously very pushy. Last week the Berlin Senate pretended that an agreement to leave the urban camping had been found, in reality the Senate proposals aim only at splitting the protest-front, while activists and refugees refused the dial.
The refugees’ protest in Hamburg, named “Lampedusa in Hamburg”, started in the same way. Month after month it gained the consensus and support of citizens, allowing migrants to find hospitality in churches, schools, social centres and to fight the battle for their right of residence with more strength and less disadvantages.

Near Frankfurt, the newly born Lampedusa in Hanau took to the streets more than 300 refugees last 17th of march. Refugees from Eritrea and Somalia demonstrated against the measures of repatriation to Italy and Malta in front of the Italian Embassy in Frankfurt. According to the Dublin Regulation, these countries are those responsible for their asylum applications and reception measures, as they are first-entry EU countries.
As reported by German collectives, the orders of expulsion towards countries of first entry such as Italy and Hungary have grown since the approval of the third Dublin Regulation: last December, the German immigration office sent more than one thousand asylum applications to these two countries. The Dublin Unit transfer orders, in view of a strict implementation of the Dublin Regulation III, followed.
Forced transfers which are turned into real deportations: "Stop illegal deportations to lawless Italy" is written on the demo banners. The refugees tell that they left Italy because they lived in inhuman conditions in overcrowded camps, with no home, no safety, no food and constantly in danger, at the mercy of sexual assaults and racist attacks.

The respect of the human rights is envisaged by international protection law, but it is constantly violated. This is what associations, collectives, organizations have been struggling against for years. A sentence of the London Supreme Court has intervened last February to appeal to the 3rd Article of the European Convention on Human Rights in order to stop the repatriation to Italy of four migrants because of the risk, for them, to come under inhuman and unjust treatments.
The administrative court in Darmstadt, Germany, took a similar provision in November 2011, whilelast year the Administrative Court of Frankfurt spoke out against the return to Italy, under the Dublin Regulation, of an Afghan citizen.

We strongly support the mobilization of those refugees in Europe who claim for the right of choice. A right to choose over their lives which they had already claimed during the North Africa Emergency Operation, when they were forced to live in shameful camps. By that time, they had been deprived not only of the possibility of exercising the right to mobility, but also to exercise an informed and ware access to asylum.

The reference to Lampedusa in the name of such migrants’ and refugees’ movements tells us very much about their experience in Italy. Naming themselves "Lampedusa in Hamburg/Hanau" is not only a testimony of their migration path, but it also shows that the pushing-back they experienced in the Mediterranean border goes far beyond the island of Lampedusa, which has become synonymous with the European policies of closure. Such a refoulement practice is projected into the heart of Europe, where refugees and migrants (but now more and more people) experience similarly ruthless forms of exclusion.

As they cross the Mediterranean, the Egeo and the Ceuta and Melilla "valla", they know that they will have to face with the same determination other boundaries within the territories of Europe, resisting to “miserable reception”, detentions, regulations and restrictions of free movement and residence, confronting with an arsenal of measures meant to marginalize, select, blackmail and exploit an increasingly larger number of non-citizens.

Translated from Italian by Giulia Torci

[ 24 March 2014 ]