Asylum – a right denied: no to the European Union’s lists of “safe countries”!
Published: 1 Jul 2016
EuroMed Rights aims to promote and strengthen human rights and democratic reform in the Euro-Mediterranean region by developing and strengthen partnerships between NGOs in the region, advocating for human rights values and developing capacities in this regard. This piece was originally published on the EuroMed website and is reprinted here with permission. It has been lightly edited lightly for Rights in Exile style.
No country can be deemed “safe.” That is the spirit of the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which provides for the individual examination of each asylum claim: each personal situation is unique and no country is free from malfunctioning or human rights violations.
To label a country as a “safe country of origin” suggests that there is no general risk of persecution and that the state of law is respected. A “safe” country can also be categorised as a “safe third country” where asylum seekers who have transited through the said country may be returned there, because their asylum procedures are in line with international and European refugee law standards.
This notion of safety as an examination tool can therefore have dire consequences on asylum seekers’ rights. That is why we at EuroMed Rights, the European Association for the Defense of Human Rights (AEDH) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) are fiercely opposed to the use of the notion of “safety”! In September 2015, the European Commission proposed a draft Regulation establishing an EU common list of safe countries of origin listing the following countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey.
Based on first-hand collected information, our organisations assert that Turkey is not a safe country, neither for citizens of Turkey, nor for migrants and refugees. This is even more the case with the resurgence of the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Kurdish regions since July 2015 which has caused over 350,000 people to be internally displaced, in addition to the knock-on effect of the conflict in Syria on Turkish soil where over 2,500,000 refugees are displaced.
On 13 May 2016, the German Bundestag gave its approval to the listing of Maghreb countries as “safe” countries of origin. This policy development was preceded, in early 2016, by the conclusion of agreements with Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to facilitate the readmission of rejected asylum seekers originating from these countries. Out of the 28 Member States of the EU, only 12 have national “safe countries of origin” lists: only Bulgaria has listed Algeria as a safe country of origin and no other Member State has deemed Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia such so far.
For more details as to what the ‘safe country’ of origin entails, read EuroMed Rights’ analysishere.