[ad_1]
Denmark is likely to become the first EU country to prosecute asylum seekers outside Europe, in a government proposal that has angered human rights defenders.
The country’s parliament will vote on a law on Thursday that would allow Denmark to send asylum seekers to a third country, most likely to Africa, to have their claims assessed.
First readings of the bill they have received support not only from the ruling center-left Social Democrats, but also from the center-right opposition.
But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees does denounced as a “terrifying race to the bottom” that goes against the principles of international asylum cooperation.
Demark has earned a reputation for taking one of the toughest stances on migration in the EU, under the leadership of the immigration minister Mattias Tesfaye, a Social Democrat who is himself the son of an Ethiopian immigrant.
The country is the first in Europe to declare the area around the Syrian capital, Damascus, safe for refugees go back to. The government has also taken harsh internal measures, including forced evictions in immigrant neighborhoods to try to break what it calls ghettos in several Danish cities.
According to the latest proposals, asylum seekers arriving in Denmark would be transported to a third country, where their application would be processed. If successful, the asylum seeker would be allowed to remain in the third country and, if not, that nation would deport them.
“The current asylum system has failed. It is inefficient and unfair. Children, women and men drown in the Mediterranean or are mistreated along migration routes, while human traffickers make a fortune, “Tesfaye told the Financial Times, adding that” a key goal “was to reduce the number of “spontaneous” asylum seekers in Denmark.
Denmark is just the latest attempt by European countries to establish asylum camps in Africa. Then the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair tried in 2004 to persuade Tanzania to process asylum applications, but failed.
Some left-wing lawmakers criticized the government for not indicating which third country it would use, saying they refused to give it a “carte blanche”. But attention has focused on Rwanda after Tesfaye and another Danish minister traveled to the capital Kigali in late April and signed a memorandum of understanding on asylum and migration.
The agreement did not include anything about the processing of asylum applications and Kigali made it clear that “receiving asylum seekers from Denmark” was not part of the agreement either. But Amnesty International still warned that any attempt by Denmark to send asylum seekers to a third country would be “not only unconscious, but potentially illegal”.
Rwanda has a tradition of hosting refugees and welcomes about 130,000, mostly from neighboring Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although previous plans to relocate African migrants from Israel to Rwanda fell through in 2018, last year the so-called Emergency Traffic Mechanism (ETM) center was established in Gashora.
The move came after the Rwandan government, UNHCR and the African Union signed an agreement to take in refugees and asylum seekers who had been detained in detention centers in Libya. More than 500 refugees – mainly from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia – have been sent from Libya to Rwanda.
[ad_2]
Source link
