Europe’s War on Smugglers Is Counterproductive, Report Claims
E.U. policy is driving, rather than combating, people smuggling, a new report claims. The study from the MEDMIG project found that efforts to contain migrant flows had spurred smuggling activity.
“E.U. politicians and policymakers have repeatedly declared they are ‘at war’ with the smugglers and that they intend to ‘break the smugglers’ business model’,” said Franck Duvell, from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. “The closure of borders seems likely to have significantly increased the demand for, and use of, smugglers.”
The study, based on 500 interviews with refugees and migrants, also found their total journey times differed sharply depending on whether they had taken central or eastern Mediterranean routes. The longer journeys, using the Libya–Italy route, reflected migrants’ attempts to settle nearer home before finally risking the sea crossing to Europe.
Coauthor Professor Heaven Crawley from the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations said it was “grossly misleading” to treat “the movement of refugees and migrants as a linear, uninterrupted flow of people.”
Amnesty Accuses Italy of Torturing Migrants
Rights group Amnesty has accused Italy of migrant abuses amounting to torture. As the country struggles to process hundreds of thousands of arrivals from Africa, basic rights had been violated in isolated cases, the group alleges.
The allegations include beatings, electric shocks and sexual humiliation in a very small number of cases where migrants refused to be fingerprinted. The claims were based on 170 interviews carried out in Italy since June 2015.
“In their determination to reduce the onward movement of refugees and migrants to other member states, E.U. leaders have driven the Italian authorities to the limits, and beyond, of what is legal,” said Matteo de Bellis from Amnesty.
Italy’s Interior Ministry made no immediate comment on the report.
Over the past three years more than 470,000 migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have reached Italy by boat.
Belgian Minister Fined for Refusing Visas to Aleppo Family
Belgium’s immigration minister is being fined thousands of euros per day for refusing to grant visas to a family in Syria.
Bailiffs have been sent to demand 4,000 euros per day ($4,430) from Theo Francken.
A Belgian tribunal has ruled three times in favor of visas for the Aleppo family of four, but the minister, whose office oversees the issue of visas, has refused to grant them. Francken’s daily fines already amount to 33,000 euros.
Francken argues that the family, whose children are 5 and 8 years old, have only tenuous links to Syrians in Belgium and that the visas would set a precedent that could open the floodgates for other Syrians to follow.
The family’s lawyer, Olivier Stein, denied the claims. “This is a family who can prove they are in immediate danger of being killed. This is a very special case. We have provided proof of that.”
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