An underlying principle in international refugee law is that all countries should share responsibility to ensure the right to asylum of everyone at risk of persecution.
However, various political leaders and commentators across Europe now propose refusing to consider the people’s asylum claims and transporting them to other countries as ways to avoid this responsibility.
Poland and Italy are attempting to implement such policies while others contemplate following suit.
This is despite all the human, financial and administrative ruin inflicted in the UK by a government that, for nearly four years prior to July’s election, pursued its own policy of refusing to consider claims and attempting to cast off responsibility onto another country.
Sadly, those who squandered billions of pounds, inflicted widespread human misery, witnessed record levels of suicide and ripped up basic understandings of law and principle in the UK still refuse to face up to the disaster they caused.
Worse, they and their supporters continue promoting the same or similar policy that has already done so much damage.
Before its end, 2024 has already witnessed the death of over 50 people attempting to cross the Channel to seek safety in the UK – more than any previous year on record. A baby’s lifeless body was pulled from the sea last week. Only a few days later two more people are now dead.
Shirking not sharing
The level of wealth and infrastructure in most European countries far outstrips that in many parts of the world.
For decades, Western and Central Europe has enjoyed political stability that many other places and populations can only imagine. But the small proportion of the world’s refugees seeking safety on this continent face growing political hostility.
These relatively rich countries seem increasingly incapable of cooperating to fulfil their obligation to provide asylum – a legal duty created in response to war and inhumanity that devastated their populations and territories in the 1940s.
Dreadful consequences
People have been dying in large numbers at Europe’s borders for far too many years.
In response, governments have neither improved search and rescue capacities nor developed safe, managed routes for refugees to reach safety on their soil. Instead, they have criminalised humanitarians saving lives at sea and increased the dangers to refugees – even funding those who intercept, capture and abuse them.
The business of people smugglers and human traffickers is thriving.
In response, political leaders grandstand that they will “smash” criminal gangs, with more money and powers for policing and prosecution.
Yet, all too frequently, the people prosecuted and imprisoned are not smugglers or traffickers but their victims. Hate and violence is stirred against refugees to sustain racism, Islamophobia, and other prejudice that harms many people and communities.
In response, political leaders condemn violence while warning of threats to social cohesion by scapegoating the victims of that violence.
Meanwhile, people seeking safety from conflict, torture, and repression are excluded and marginalised – their integration made impossible even as they are accused of failing to contribute or fit in.
It need not be this way
Some still vilify Angele Merkel for famously announcing – “Wir schaffen das” (We can do this) – in response to Syrians seeking safety in Europe in 2015.
Germany shot up the world rankings regarding the number of refugees each country hosts, taking a disproportionate share of responsibility to itself and so minimising what was required from other European nations.
Having led again on welcoming Ukrainian refugees in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion, Germany is now among world leaders in hosting numbers of refugees – though several much poorer countries host far greater numbers in proportionate or even absolute terms.
What was stark about 2015 – and continues to be so – is not, however, Merkel’s words or Germany’s response to refugees.
Rather, it was and remains the failure of other European leaders and nations to step up and share responsibility together for providing asylum.
At the time, the UK was very quick to signal it would not do so, and several Eastern European countries soon followed.
The present day
In 2024, the Syrian crisis remains unresolved, Afghanistan is again under Taliban rule, Sudan has collapsed into civil war, and the scale and scope of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, many of whom have been refugees for decades, is still escalating. People will therefore continue seeking safety in Europe – even while countries such as Chad, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Uganda host far larger refugee populations.
Sadly, European leaders still choose to perpetuate, even intensify, their efforts to simply deter and prevent people seeking asylum in their countries alongside their hostility and scapegoating of the people who nonetheless do.
This is to choose more dangerous journeys, more human exploitation, more death and suffering and greater expenditure on border and asylum systems that in turn serve to increase these evils and their wider impact.
One country’s attempt at freeloading encourages the same elsewhere – and since this can never relieve the desperate circumstances of refugees, nothing is solved.
UK leaders have too long attempted to shirk responsibility, even to the point of wrecking the country’s own asylum system.
Its new government has quickly abandoned some of its predecessor’s worst excesses. But it must go further.
Leading and cooperating on providing asylum
Making its own system work fairly and efficiently to protect refugees who arrive on its shores, while safely identifying and returning people to their home country if they have no good claim to stay.
Working with neighbouring countries to receive more of its share of people seeking asylum through routes established by governments rather than dangerous ones controlled by criminal gangs.
Thereby encouraging others – near and far – to better meet their responsibilities.
Failing to do this won’t end refugees’ need to seek safety but will lessen chances they find it elsewhere.
That won’t reduce journeys, opportunities for smugglers and traffickers, deaths, traumas, and their terrible impacts.
Indeed, as the UK has shown over the last several years, it will make all this far worse.
Steve has recently authored the briefing – A fair and efficient process for making asylum decisions.
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