The EU undermines its own rule of law by trying to dismantle asylum laws. After years of human rights violations at the EU's external borders, the EU is now trying to legally legitimise those crimes for the first time. A new regulation aims to systematically disenfranchise those seeking protection.
On 8 December, the European Union's Home Affairs and Justice Council will vote in Brussels on a regulation that will give legal legitimacy to the EU's deadly isolationist agenda. The so-called ‘Instrumentalisation Regulation’ would allow EU states to restrict the right to asylum if they perceive a threat to "national security". In practical terms, this would mean that EU countries could only admit asylum claims to be made at certain registration points. Firstly, this can make it extremely difficult or even impossible to claim asylum, and secondly, it massively facilitates the possibility of illegal pushbacks. Pushbacks are also encouraged by the fact that people seeking protection do not have to be registered for up to four weeks. In addition, all people who claim asylum can be detained at the external borders for up to five months, while even worse reception conditions are created, leaving people in limbo and with less access to fundamental rights.
The regulation is another perfidious attempt by the EU to dehumanise people on the move. People seeking protection are to be constructed as a supposed threat that must be responded to in terms of security policy. This is built on the narrative of vulnerable people as ‘weapons’ in a hybrid warfare and therefore pose a threat to the security of entire nation-states. This securitisation of migration legitimises a policy of permanent exceptions, such as the undermining of fundamental human rights like the principle of non-refoulment or the right to asylum.
The European Union, and thus also Germany, bear the responsibility that a system of human rights violations, torture and deaths has already developed at Europe's external borders, and are now trying to legally justify and even strengthen the policy of foreclosure. This policy must finally be ended.
We call on the members of the Council for Home Affairs and Justice of the European Union to vote against the Instrumentalisation Regulation!
© Maria Klenner/Mare Liberum