Human Rights

France, who assumed the six-month European Presidency on July 1st, is pushing its own strict immigration agenda onto Europe.

Amnesty International, alarmed at some of France’s proposals, is calling on the European Parliament to respect its human rights mandate.  Meanwhile French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s historically low home approval ratings and less than stunning attempts at national reform is hoping the EU presidency will resurrect his image as an effective statesman.

Sarkozy is banking on the Pact on Immigration and Asylum at the upcoming EU summit in October.  On the agenda is the refusal of ‘en masse’ regularizations, asylum policies, strengthening EU borders, and the rules for the return of illegal immigrants.

Europe’s growing conservatism will be a facilitating factor for its approval. For a man who transformed immigration into a question of internal security, Sarkozy’s proposals are enjoying broad EU consensus.

He promised to “rid” France of 25,000 illegal immigrants in 2007.  “It’s a campaign commitment. The French are expecting this of me,” he said in an interview in Le Point magazine according to Spiegel Online. The problem for Sarkozy is that while internal security and immigration netted him an election, today’s Frenchman is more concerned about the rising costs of food, fuel, dwindling purchasing power, and controversial income and employment reforms.

Last year, France passed a degenerate bill requiring non-EU nationals wishing to join their expatriated families to undergo invasive genetic profiling; a medical procedure initially costing the obsequious migrant several hundred euros. Biology, not human rights principals, is key to legal French residency. Protests eventually watered down the bill.

Familial reunification also requires family members to have a working knowledge of French, endorse French values, and have a substantial cash reserve. France has since attempted to introduce a similar policy on the EU level entitled “obligatory integration contract.”

The contract would bind immigrants into accepting European values and adopt local national identities. What the contract entails and its potential fallout is a minor lesson in the intractability of France’s fear of the ‘Other.’

Several EU countries saw it for what it was – discrimination. Spain led the fight and the proposal was eventually dropped but not before French Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux attempted to sell the idea in a whirlwind tour of the continent’s 27 capitals, minus Paris.

Europe wants to attract the right kind of immigrant. Setting out pro-active homogeneous immigration policies is a sensible idea.

According to a report presented at the European Parliament, 85% of unskilled labor migrations go to the Europe and 5% to the US.  But what does one do with eight million unskilled illegal immigrant workers already on the continent?

At the heart of France’s EU immigration pact is a draft directive for the return of immigrants. Under the “Return Directive”, illegal immigrants can be detained for 18 months. Once deported, they are barred from re-entering Europe up to five years.

Immigrants awaiting deportation set fire to the Mesnil-Amelot detention center near Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport earlier this month.  In June, a similar incident mostly destroyed France’s largest deportation center at Vincennes in the outskirts of Paris. French aid organizations supporting immigrant rights have since been banned from demonstrating (in French) near the Mesnil-Amelot detention center.

The president is desperate to shake-off the post-election blues. Sarkozy wants quick results while ignoring long-term consequences. The French do not recognize their president.   Adopting restrictive immigration policies against the most vulnerable members of society is counter-productive.

Low-skilled labor is vital to France and the EU.  The human tragedies currently unfolding in France’s detention centers are a harbinger of what irregular migrant workers will face throughout the whole of Europe.

FPA Migration blogger Cathryn Cluver provides an excellent analysis on French immigration and the lead up to presidential elections here.

After a series of bombings in Sukhumi and Gagra, the Abkhaz de-facto authorities closed the checkpoint on the Inguri bridge yesterday. Unfortunately, my permission entry letter to Abkhazia is dated July 1st.  Having come so far, I still tried to cross.

I made it past the Georgian and Russian armed guards only to be stopped by a nervous looking Abkhaz militia with a kalashnikov. A handful of Georgians were grouped near the Abkhaz checkpoint and some are being let through.  According to a source inside UNOMIG here in Zugdidi, a border town, another explosion occurred near the bridge this morning close to a Russian peacekeeping post.  There were no injuries and the local authorities are currently investigating.

The closed border means Georgian “retournees” in the Gali District in Abkhazia are severed from Zugdidi, a vital trading center and link.  Without access to Zugdidi, the Georgian “retournees” cannot sell their produce of nuts and citris fruit.  There are anywhere between 45 to 65K Georgians living in the Gali District, a conflict zone that has seen its share of war, terror, and human rights violations.  In Zugdidi, there are around 40,000 IDPs still hoping to return one day to Abkhazia.  But the current situation is hardly promising.

“IDPs get 15 laris a month,” Captain Davide Caprani, Team Leader and Police Advisor for the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) in Zugdidi told me today. “They try to work but most can’t return  [to Abkhazia].”

I’ll leave it there.  For more information and updates please refer to Civil Georgia.

To follow up on yesterday’s post, I happened to stumble across a group of illegal immigrants in Paris protesting for their rights. The following is an interview conducted on a street corner in the 19th arrondissement (quarter or neighborhood). A dozen or so illegal immigrants were flying banners in front of a restaurant where some of them worked and were exploited.

This particular group have been protesting for two months and are demanding to be recognized as a legal. All of them work. The problem is that while the state is all too happy to take a huge cut out of their pay, it won’t provide them with any social benefits or health care.

This is the story of 39-year old Toure Racine from Senegal. He came to France in 2000 and works as a cook. He is married to a Senegalese who is also an illegal immigrant. Together, they have three children, all born in France but who have no rights either.

After protesting for two months, Toure finally got his papers yesterday. He is now considered legal and has the rights of any ordinary French citizen. However, many of his friends in similar situations, have yet to obtain legal status. Some he says have been working for 10 or even 20 years paying into a system without access to the benefits. Toure says it’s because they have found a solidarity movement that they are now finally beginning to receive their due.

“My message, whether it’s for American or German or what have you authorities, is that they do something for the security of their immigrants. That they exist outside the regulations and yet work and contribute, all we want is to live like everyone else, that is the message I would like to pass on to everyone.” Toure Racine.

In French. My apologies for the poor audio quality.

For the past few years, Europe has gravitated towards nationalism and government policy initiatives geared against immigration and asylum seekers. In France, the situation is hardly promising for illegal immigrants currently working hotels, construction, restoration, and most any other low-wage jobs considered too menial for majority of the French. Faced with the precious nature of their situation, illegal immigrants are beginning to take a stand.

France refers to immigrants without proper legal status as sans-papiers, literally “without papers”. An article in the June 2008 edition Le Monde Diplomatique (see Delocalises de l’interieur by Olivier Piot - subscription required) traces the working conditions and exploitation of working illegal immigrants in France. There are anywhere between 300,000 to 600,000 working illegal immigrants.

Five thousand sans-papiers took to the streets in protest in Paris on May 1st. France’s high tax scheme provides comfortable benefits. Untold thousands pay into the system and yet are denied any rights to social welfare and health care. Exploitation is rampant as employers abuse the illegal status of the workers to their advantage.

In July of last year, Paris passed legislation requiring employers to declare any worker without proper papers or face a massive 15,000 Euro fine and up to five years in prison. Then in November, it released a list of 150 job functions that desperately require workers. However, solidarity organizations such as Droits devant! criticize the state for not developing a comprehensive regulation plan to expedite the necessary papers to fill those positions.

“We don’t have much to lose,” one worker without papers near Paris told Le Monde Diplomatique, “By going on strike or by participating in protests, we know what we risk. Each sans-papier who walks out of the shadow exposes himself and may be expulsed at any moment. But we have been living in fear everyday for years that we will be arrested and sent back to our countries. This is why we have decided to fight!”

A dilapidated concrete house in Tel Aviv is the current homestead of 340 African refugees. Most have come from the war-torn regions of Darfur. Others from Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast, crowding the poorly ventilated corridors and rooms.

Some paid smugglers to get them first through Egypt and then into Israel, a country that prides itself for its willingness to welcome the persecuted. But for the estimated 6000 African refugees who have made the perilous crossing the welcome is bittersweet.

The Knesset has yet to implement a national policy for the refugees who now hover in limbo; classified as de facto stateless. Instead, the responsibility falls on local NGOs, civil society and the good will of volunteers. And yet Israel ratified the 1954 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (pdf) in 1958.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has no information on stateless persons in Israel. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is quick to harp – “A tsunami,” was his comment.

With no legal status, the stateless do not enjoy the protections of normal citizens, nor even those granted to officially recognized refugees. When the shelters are full, they are forced into the streets. Many are arrested and sent to prison.

Victoria from Sudan and her 7 year-old son, Joseph, spent more than a month in an Israeli prison. Not because they committed a crime, but because they had no papers, no status. They were later released with the aid of a local NGO and sent to temporary shelter at the Kibbutz Eilot.

Others are less fortunate and either remain in prison or are simply deported.

For more information, view this short documentary by the Guardian.

Intrepid is the usual label for a distinguished character, a person of influence. It would be fair to judge Italy’s own Pier Paolo Pasolini as such and more. Film-maker, playwright, poet, novelist, etc., indelibly surrounded by controversy.

Perhaps less well known was Paolo’s column as a political thinker who challenged the traditionalist conventions of Italian culture. He wrote of the exploited, the underclass, the dispossessed and the abused. Indeed, many of his films explored the fringes of Italy’s urban disaffected – because ultimately - fascism never seemed to quite disappear nor its Pavlovian partner of the Higher Order.

Now 33 years after his murder, what would Paolo make of Italy’s recent arrest and expulsion of immigrants in the slums surrounding its magnificent metropoles? Perhaps he would say something along the lines of middle-east correspondent Robert Fisk (and I paraphrase) : the only thing that history has taught us is that we never learn from history.

We are in a sense condemned to repeat; like Mr. Pavlov’s intrepid dog, conditioned through circumstance and baseless rhetoric. “Never again, illegal immigrants under your house!” reads the Italian People of Liberty Party platform who secured last month’s national election win. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is at the helm of an anti-immigrant campaign that blithely condemns these people of South America, North Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Last week, a mob of several hundred Italians rampaged a Roma camp just outside Naples. Some threw firebombs. An Italian paper reported the mob as yelling ”Out, out, you’re dirty and smelly and rob babies.” Romanians, mind you, have every right as EU citizens (since January ‘07) to travel and live freely wherever they please.

But Berolusconi has promised to sweep clean the slums, the outskirts, and to rid the nation of the latest blight. There are talks Italy may even renege on the Schengen agreement which allows travelers to freely cross national borders throughout the European Union.

I leave you with a refrain of a much longer poem entitled Victory by Pasolini:

“That the revolution becomes a desert

if it is always without victory. . . that it may not be
too late for those who want to win, but not with the violence
of the old, desperate weapons. . . .”

The executioners wear suits and ties to match. Clean-shaved, hair brushed back, a news camera crew follows all five of them into a sterile lobby at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, its capital city. They came for Ama Sumani, in her wheelchair, and dying of malignant myeloma she requires kidney dialysis three times a week. At precisely 8:00 am, the Immigration Officers rolled her out of the hospital and drove her straight to the airport.

Ama Sumani came to Wales five years ago and studied accounting. The money she earned she sent back to Ghana, to her two children. She developed a terminally ill cancer and was hospitalized. And then her visa expired. Appeals to the United Kingdom’s (UK) Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) were denied. In Accra, Ghana’s capital, the hospital charges $6,000 for three months of dialysis, prohibitively expensive for a country where the average income for those employed is just $2,500. But no matter, the drugs to treat her cancer are not even available in Ghana.

She would be sent to her death and her 16 year-old daughter and seven year old son were to become orphans. Upon her arrival in Ghana, she began to deteriorate. Back in Wales, friends and community movements raised $116,000 US in public donations for her cause - to send her back to Wales, to get the treatment she required, to care for her children. A pharmaceutical company had agreed to supply her the medication free of charge. But Ama died in Ghana and her death is a blight on a UK immigration and asylum system gone terribly wrong.

The IND is outlining a program to provide “the confidence that our borders are secure, that those who have no right to be here be removed…”. This includes sending a cancer patient in a wheelchair to her death. For Habib Rahman, Chief Executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the UK government’s attack on immigration and asylum seekers is unprecedented. “It seems this Government is looking to set a record for the number of immigration-related bills it can introduce,” he said. While Ama’s case is tragic, it is not an exception. The UK charter’s four to five flights a month, sending the “illegals” back to whence they came or escaped; sometimes knowingly to their death.