• When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

    A Haitian boy arrived on Florida’s maritime border. His next five days detained at sea illuminate the crisis facing children traveling to the U.S. alone and the crews forced to send them back.

    Tcherry’s mother could see that her 10-year-old son was not being taken care of. When he appeared on their video calls, his clothes were dirty. She asked who in the house was washing his shirts, the white Nike T-shirt and the yellow one with a handprint that he wore in rotation. He said nobody was, but he had tried his best to wash them by hand in the tub. His hair, which was buzzed short when he lived with his grandmother in Haiti, had now grown long and matted. He had already been thin, but by January, after three months in the smuggler’s house, he was beginning to look gaunt. Tcherry told his mother that there was not enough food. He said he felt “empty inside.”

    More strangers, most of them Haitian like Tcherry, continued to arrive at the house in the Bahamas on their way to the United States. One day police officers came with guns, and Tcherry hid in a corner; they left when a man gave them money. The next time he and his mother talked, Tcherry lowered his bright, wide-set eyes and spoke to her in a quieter voice. “It was like he was hiding,” his mother, Stephania LaFortune, says. “He was scared.” Tcherry told her he didn’t want to spend another night on the thin mattress in the front room with scuffed pink walls. She assured him it would be over soon. A boat would take him to Florida, and then he would join her in Canada, where she was applying for asylum. LaFortune texted Tcherry photos of the city where she lived. The leaves had turned brown and fallen from the trees. Still, she was there, and that’s where Tcherry wanted to be. He waited another week, then two, then three.

    Tcherry didn’t laugh or play for months on end, until one day in February, when two sisters, both Haitian citizens, were delivered to the house. One was a 4-year-old named Beana. She wore a pink shirt and cried a lot. The other, Claire, was 8. She had a round face and a burn on her hand; she said that at the last house they’d stayed in, a girl threw hot oil on her. Claire did everything for her sister, helping her eat, bathe and use the bathroom. Like Tcherry, the girls were traveling to join their mother, who was working at a Michigan auto plant on a temporary legal status that did not allow her to bring her children from abroad. Their clothes were as dirty as his. Sometimes Tcherry and Claire watched videos on his phone. They talked about their mothers. “I am thinking about you,” Tcherry said in a message to his mother in early February. “It has been a long time.”

    Finally, nearly four months after Tcherry arrived at the house, one of the men in charge of the smuggling operation woke him and the two girls early in the morning. “He told us to get ready,” Tcherry recalls. With nothing but the clothes they wore, no breakfast or ID, they were loaded into a van and were dropped off at a trash-lined canal just outside Freeport, Bahamas. In the muck and garbage, more than 50 people stood waiting as a boat motored toward them. “Not a good boat,” Tcherry told me, “a raggedy boat.” But nobody complained. The 40-foot vessel tilted from the weight as people climbed aboard and pushed into the two dank cabins, sitting shoulder to shoulder or standing because there was no more space. Tcherry felt the boat speeding up, taking them out to sea.

    For almost 12 hours they traveled west, packed together in cabins that now smelled of vomit and urine. In the lower cabin, a baby was crying incessantly. A heavily pregnant woman offered up the last of her package of cookies to the child’s mother to help soothe the infant. Tcherry was thirsty and exhausted. Not far from him, he heard a woman say that the children’s parents must be wicked for sending them alone into the sea.

    The passengers had been promised they would reach U.S. shores hours earlier. People were starting to panic, sure that they were lost, when passengers sitting near the windows saw lights, at first flickering and then bright — the lights of cars and buildings. “That is Florida,” a young man said as the boat sped toward shore. Tcherry pulled on his sneakers. “If I make it,” he thought, “I will spend Christmas with my family.”

    But as quickly as the lights of Florida came into view, police lights burst upon them. A siren wailed. People screamed, a helicopter circled overhead and an officer on a sheriff’s boat pointed a long gun toward them. Uniformed men climbed on board, yelled orders and handed out life jackets. The group of 54 people was transferred to a small Coast Guard cutter. As the sun rose over Florida just beyond them, a man with a tattoo on his arm of a hand making the sign of the benediction began recording a video on his phone. “As you can see, we are in Miami,” he said. “As you can see, we are on a boat with a bunch of small children.” He intended to send the video to relatives waiting for him on land, and he urged them to contact lawyers. But his phone was confiscated, and the video was never sent.

    The Coast Guard frames its operations in the sea as lifesaving work: Crews rescue people from boats at risk of capsizing and pull them from the water. But the agency, which is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, also operates as a maritime border patrol, its ships as floating holding facilities. Since the summer of 2021, the Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people, a number larger than in any similar period in nearly three decades. On a single day in January, the agency’s fleet of ships off the Florida coast collectively held more than 1,000 people. The public has no way of knowing what happens on board. Unlike at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is closely monitored by advocates, the courts and the press, immigration enforcement at sea takes place out of public view.

    The Coast Guard routinely denies journalists’ requests to witness immigration patrols, but in early March, I learned that several days earlier, a boat carrying dozens of Haitians had been stopped so close to land that they were first chased down by the Palm Beach County sheriff’s marine unit. Among them were three unaccompanied children: two young sisters and a 10-year-old boy. In the months afterward, I obtained a trove of internal Coast Guard documents, including emails and a database of the agency’s immigration interdictions, and I tracked down Tcherry, Claire and Beana and 18 people traveling with them. Many of them told me about the five days they spent detained on Coast Guard ships — an experience, one man said, “that will remain a scar in each person’s mind.”

    People intercepted at sea, even in U.S. waters, have fewer rights than those who come by land. “Asylum does not apply at sea,” a Coast Guard spokesperson told me. Even people who are fleeing violence, rape and death, who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled. To try to get through, people held on Coast Guard ships have occasionally taken to harming themselves — swallowing sharp objects, stabbing themselves with smuggled knives — in the hope that they’ll be rushed to emergency rooms on land where they can try to claim asylum.

    The restrictions, combined with the nearly 30-year spike in maritime migration, created a crisis for the Coast Guard too, leading to what one senior Coast Guard official described in an internal email in February as “war-fighting levels of stress and fatigue.” Coast Guard crew members described to me their distress at having to reject desperate person after desperate person, but the worst part of the job, several said, was turning away the children who were traveling alone. From July 2021 to September 2023, the number of children without parents or guardians held by the Coast Guard spiked, a nearly tenfold increase over the prior two years. Most of them were Haitian. “The hardest ones for me are the unaccompanied minors,” one crew member told me. “They’re put on this boat to try to come to America, and they have no one.”

    The treatment of children is perhaps the starkest difference between immigration policy on land and at sea. At land borders, unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot simply be turned back. They are assigned government caseworkers and are often placed in shelters, then with family members, on track to gain legal status. That system has its own serious failings, but the principle is that children must be protected. Not so at sea. U.S. courts have not determined what protections should extend to minors held on U.S. ships, even those detained well within U.S. waters. The Coast Guard says that its crew members screen children to identify “human-trafficking indicators and protection concerns including fear of return.” A spokesperson told me that “migrants who indicate a fear of return receive further screening” by Homeland Security officials.

    But of the almost 500 unaccompanied children held on the agency’s cutters in the Caribbean and the Straits of Florida between July 2021 and early September 2023, five were allowed into the U.S. because federal agencies believed they would face persecution at home, even amid escalating violence in Haiti, including the documented murder and rape of children. One other child was medically evacuated to a hospital in Florida, and six were brought to land for reasons that the internal Coast Guard records do not explain. The rest were delivered back to the countries they left, and it’s often unclear where they go once they return. Some have nowhere to stay and no one to take care of them. On occasion, they are so young that they don’t know the names of their parents or the country where they were born. One official from an agency involved in processing people delivered by the U.S. Coast Guard to Haiti told me “it is an open secret” that the process can be dangerously inconsistent. “Children leave the port,” the official said, “and what happens to them after they leave, no one knows.”

    Stephania LaFortune had not wanted to send her 10-year-old son on a boat by himself. She knew firsthand how perilous the journey could be. In May 2021, before the boat she had boarded made it to a Florida beach, some of the passengers jumped into the water to wade through the heavy waves. “They almost drowned,” she told me when I met her in Toronto. LaFortune waited on the beached vessel until U.S. Border Patrol officials came to detain her. In detention, she claimed asylum and was soon released. For months, she searched for other ways to bring Tcherry to her, but LaFortune ultimately determined she had no alternative.

    The first time LaFortune left Tcherry, he was 3 years old. Her husband, a police cadet, had been shot in his uniform and left to die in a ditch outside Port-au-Prince, and LaFortune, fearing for her life, departed for the Bahamas. Tcherry stayed behind with his grandmother. Four years later, as violence began to flare again, Tcherry’s mother finally made good on her promise to send for him. She arranged for him to fly to the Bahamas, where she had remarried and had a baby girl. But Tcherry was in the Bahamas not even a year when LaFortune told him that she would be leaving again — not because she wanted to, she assured her sobbing son, but because she had seen how Haitians were harassed and deported, and she simply didn’t believe there was real opportunity there. Tcherry’s stepfather and his younger half sister, who were Bahamian citizens, joined LaFortune months later. She arranged for Tcherry to live with relatives, promising to send for him as soon as she could.

    LaFortune’s asylum case in Florida dragged on, so she and her husband and daughter traveled over land to Canada, where they hoped they could get legal status more quickly. While they waited for a decision in their asylum case, the relative Tcherry was staying with said he could no longer take care of a growing boy by himself. After begging others to take her son, LaFortune found a woman she knew back in Haiti who said she was planning to make the trip to Florida herself with her own children. For $3,000, the woman said, she could take Tcherry with them. LaFortune sent the money. The woman took Tcherry to the smuggler’s house and did not return for him.

    That house, and the one where Tcherry was moved next, were filled with Haitians fleeing the crisis that began in July 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a team of mostly Colombian mercenaries hired through a Miami-area security company. The U.S. Justice Department has accused nearly a dozen people, some based in the United States, of setting the assassination in motion. As the Haitian state crumbled, proliferating gangs, many with ties to the country’s political elite, burst from the neighborhoods they’d long controlled and began terrorizing Port-au-Prince and swaths of the rest of the country. Kidnapping, extortion, the rape of women and children, and the torching of homes and neighborhoods became routine weapons of fear. Thousands have been murdered, and in June the United Nations estimated that nearly 200,000 have been internally displaced. Haitians able to gather the resources have left however they can. Many have traveled over land to the Dominican Republic or by air to South and Central America. And thousands have boarded boats bound for the beaches of Florida.

    The people on the vessel with Tcherry had reasons, each as urgent as the next, for being there. There was a 31-year-old street vendor whose Port-au-Prince neighborhood had been taken over by gangs; she said that when she tried to flee north by bus, men with guns forced her and other women off the bus and raped them. A man from a district in the north said he’d been beaten more than once by thugs sent by a political boss he’d opposed; both times they threatened to kill him. A man who worked as a Vodou priest in Port-au-Prince said he left because he needed money for his sick daughter, and gangs were confiscating his wages. The pregnant woman who helped comfort the crying baby said she had been kidnapped and raped; she was released only after her family sold land and collected donations to pay for her ransom. Two women were traveling with their daughters, but Tcherry, Claire and Beana were the only young children traveling alone.

    Tcherry sat on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter called the Manowar along with the rest of the group, exhausted, scared and confused. Nobody had explained to him what would happen next. Crew members in blue uniforms finally gave them food, small plates of rice and beans, and began to search their belongings and run their photos and fingerprints through federal immigration and criminal databases. Tcherry and the sisters followed the orders of a crew member with blond hair, cut like the soldiers in movies Tcherry had seen, to sit in the shaded spot under the stairs to the bridge.

    On the stern of the cutter, a man in his early 30s named Peterson sat watching the children. He had crossed paths with them weeks earlier in one of the houses; seeing they were hungry, he had brought them extra slices of bread and even cut Tcherry’s hair. Claire reminded him of his own young daughter in Haiti. Peterson had not wanted to leave his child, but gangs had recently taken control of roadways not far from his home in the coastal city of Saint-Marc. He had not earned a decent wage for many months, not since he lost his job as a driver at a missionary organization. He had decided to leave for the United States so he could send money back to Haiti for his daughter, who remained behind with her mother.

    Now it occurred to Peterson that his connection to Tcherry and the girls could work to his advantage. Surely the Coast Guard wouldn’t return children to Haiti, he thought. Surely they wouldn’t separate a family. “I thought that there might be an opportunity for me to get to the U.S.,” he told me. He approached Tcherry, Claire and Beana and told them they should tell the crew he was their uncle.

    Peterson’s small kindness in the smuggler’s house had given Tcherry reason to trust him. When it came time for the blond-haired crew member, Petty Officer Timothy James, to interview the children, Peterson stood close behind. With the help of another Haitian man who spoke some English, Peterson told James that he was their uncle. James asked the children if it was true. Tcherry and Claire, both timid, their eyes lowered, said it was. Beana was too young to understand. James handed her a brown teddy bear, which the crew of the Manowar keeps on board because of the growing number of children they detain, and sent the children back to the stern.

    But no more than a couple of hours later, Peterson changed his mind. He’d noticed that the pregnant woman had been evaluated by Florida EMTs, and he moved over to offer her a deal: If she would tell the crew he was her husband and let him join her if they brought her to land, his brother in Florida, who already paid $6,000 for his place on this boat, would make sure she was compensated. “I helped her understand that that is something she could profit from,” he says. The woman agreed, and Peterson, who now needed to tell the truth about the children, divulged to a crew member that he was not their uncle. “I was just trying to help if I could,” he said.

    James crouched down beside the children again and told them not to lie. “Why did you leave your home to go to the United States,” he read off a questionnaire. “To go to my parents,” Tcherry replied. To Tcherry, the questions seemed like a good sign. He was unsure whether he could trust these crew members after the officer on the sheriff boat pointed a long gun at them the night before. “I thought they were going to shoot me,” Tcherry says. But James calmly directed the children to sit in the one shaded place on the boat, and gave them cookies and slices of apple. “He was nice,” Tcherry says — the nicest anyone had been since Peterson brought them bread in the house.

    James kept reading the form. “What will happen when you get there?” he asked. Tcherry looked up. He latched onto the words “when you get there” and took them as a promise. He asked James when they would be on land. James said the same thing he told everyone on the boat: that the decision was not up to him, that he was just doing his job. Tcherry was convinced James would send him and Claire and Beana to their mothers. He thought of the story his mother had told him about his father’s murder, his body in a ditch by the road, and of his last memory of Haiti, when he passed through a gang checkpoint on the way to the airport. “I saw bandits approaching toward us, and he had a gun pulled,” Tcherry told me. “My heart started beating fast, and I thought he was going to shoot.” He was overwhelmed with relief that he would never have to go back there.

    A boat came to bring someone to land. But it was not there to pick up Tcherry or the other children. A Coast Guard medical officer had reviewed the pregnant woman’s vitals and made a decision that because she “may go into labor at any moment,” she would be brought to a hospital in Palm Beach County accompanied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Before she was taken away, Peterson said the woman told him she would not claim to be married to him after all. She didn’t want a stranger on her baby’s birth certificate. She offered to say she was his cousin. “I knew that being the cousin would not be enough,” Peterson recalls, “and I have to say that I lost hope.”

    The pregnant woman disappeared on a small boat toward land. Those left on the stern began to talk among themselves, asking why the baby, who had barely stopped crying, and the other children had been left aboard the cutter. They said they could not keep going like this, eating only small portions of scarcely cooked and saltless rice and beans, unable to bathe and forced to urinate and defecate in a toilet seat attached to a metal box with a tube off the side of the open deck. They decided they would rise in unison and protest, and they passed the word from one to the next. At around 9 p.m., dozens of people began to yell toward the bridge demanding interpreters, lawyers or just to know what would become of them. From the bow where he stood, James heard faint yelling, and then the voice of the officer in charge over the loudspeaker. “They’re starting an uprising on the fantail,” he said. “I need you back there.”

    Timothy James came from a conservative family in a conservative little town in the mountains of North Carolina. He and his wife held handguns aloft in their wedding photos, and his first job after dropping out of college was as a sheriff’s deputy at the jail. James joined the Coast Guard in 2015. “My main goal,” he told me, “was to chase down drug runners and catch migrants” — two groups that were more or less the same, as far as he understood.

    He’d been on the job no more than a few weeks before his expectations were upended. “I had no idea what I was talking about,” he told me. There was much less “running and gunning, catching bad guys” than he’d anticipated. Instead, the people he detained would tell him their stories, sometimes with the help of Google Translate on his phone, about violence and deprivation like he had never contemplated. People described what it was like to live on $12 a month. There were children and grandmothers who could have been his own, and young men not so unlike him. They were not trying to infiltrate the country as he’d thought. They were running because “they didn’t have another option,” he says.

    James and his colleagues learned the lengths people would go to try to get to land. Since last fall, people detained on cutters have pulled jagged metal cotter pins, bolts and screws from the rigging and swallowed them, apparently trying to cause such severe injury that they’d be taken to a hospital. Last August, near the Florida Keys, three Cuban men were reported to the Coast Guard by a passing towboat operator; most likely fearing they would be brought back to Cuba, they stabbed and slashed their legs with blades and were found in puddles of blood. In January, a man plunged a five-inch buck-style knife that he’d carried onto a cutter into the side of his torso and slashed it down his rib cage. The crew taped the knife to the wound to stop him from bleeding out as he fell unconscious. Most of these people were delivered to Customs and Border Protection and rushed to hospitals on land, where they probably intended to claim asylum. By the time James began working as operations officer on the Manowar last summer, he and other crew members started every leg at sea by scouring the decks for anything that people might use to harm themselves. (According to a DHS spokesperson, “medical evacuations do not mean that migrants have a greater chance of remaining in the United States.”)

    People detained on cutters have in rare cases threatened to harm Coast Guard members or others they’re traveling with. In January, a group the Coast Guard detained pushed crew members and locked arms to stop their removal to another cutter, according to an internal record. That same month, a group of Haitians held children over the side of a boat, “threatening to throw them overboard and set them on fire” if the Coast Guard came closer. Weeks later, a group of Cubans brandished poles with nails hammered into them and tried to attack an approaching Coast Guard boat. Conflicts between crew and those they detain have escalated to the point that Coast Guard members have shot people with pepper balls and subdued others with stun maneuvers.

    James tensed as he heard the order over the loudspeaker. He thought of the crowd-control techniques he’d learned to immobilize someone, and stepped down the side walkway toward the stern. In front of him were dozens of angry men and a few women, yelling in Haitian Creole. James hesitated and then walked forcefully up to the group, his hands pulled into his sides as if he were ready to throw a punch. Instead, he took a knee. He gestured to the men around him to come join him. He spoke into a cellphone in English, and on the screen he showed them the Google Translate app: “You’ve got to tell everybody to calm down,” it read in Creole. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

    Before they could respond, five other crew members came down the stairs, plastic zip ties and batons hanging from their belts. Tcherry was sitting under the stairs, beside Claire and Beana, who had not let go of the teddy bear. “Shut up, shut up,” one of the crew told the protesters as he stepped in front of Tcherry. “One of them said he was going to pepper-spray their eyes and handcuff them,” Tcherry says. James told his colleagues to wait. The yelling in English and Creole grew louder. A man to Tcherry’s left began to scream and roll on the ground, and then he rolled partway under the handrail. A crew member grabbed the man by the back of the pants and hauled him up. James secured his wrist to a post on the deck. “Nobody’s dying on my boat today,” James said.

    Above Tcherry, another crew member stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs. He held a shotgun and cocked it. James claims that the gun was not loaded, but the threat of violence had its intended effect. The protesters stepped back and went quiet.

    James kept speaking into the phone. “What do you want?” he asked the men.

    “If we go back, we’re dead,” one man replied. They said they could not endure being on the boat much longer.

    “If it were up to me, we’d be taking you to land,” James said. “But it is not up to us.” There was a process to seek protection, he told them. “But what you’re doing now is not that process.”

    Coast Guard crews do not decide who will be offered protection and who will be sent back. Their responsibility is only to document what the agency calls “manifestation of fear” (MOF) claims. The Coast Guard instructs them to make note of such claims only when people proactively assert them or when they observe people exhibiting signs of fear, such as shaking or crying. They are not supposed to ask. That may help explain why the agency has logged only 1,900 claims from more than 27,000 people detained in this region between July 2021 and September 2023. Fewer than 300 of those came from Haitians, even though they make up about a third of people held on cutters. Officials in the Coast Guard and in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told me that Haitians face a systemic disadvantage in making a successful claim for protection: Almost no one working on Coast Guard boats can speak or understand Creole. (The Coast Guard told me it has access to contracted Creole interpreters aboard cutters.)

    Regardless of the person’s nationality, the process is nearly always a dead end. Each person who makes a claim for protection is supposed to be referred to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer, who conducts a “credible fear” screening by phone or in person on a cutter. Between July 2021 and early September 2023, USCIS approved about 60 of the approximately 1,900 claims — around 3%. By contrast, about 60% of asylum applicants on land passed a credible-fear screening over roughly the same period. Unlike on land, people who are denied on ships have no access to courts or lawyers to appeal the decision. And the few who are approved are not sent to the United States at all. Should they choose to proceed with their claims, they are delivered to an immigration holding facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, where they are evaluated again. They’re told they should be prepared to wait for two years or more, until another country agrees to take them as refugees. Only 36 of the people with approved claims agreed to be sent to Guantánamo. The State Department says there are currently no unaccompanied minors held at the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo, but a recent federal contract document says that the facility is prepared to accept them.

    The Manowar crew had been tasked by the local Coast Guard office with logging any requests for protection. But the night after the protest had been too chaotic and exhausting for them to do so. In the morning, a larger cutter with more supplies arrived. The people detained on the Manowar would be transferred to that boat. Before they departed, James told them that anyone who intended to seek protection should seek help from the crew on the next boat. “Tell them, ‘I’m in fear for my life,’ just like you told me,” he said. “You tell whoever is processing you that specific thing.”

    But subsequent crews logged no such claims, according to records I obtained. One man told me that, in response to his plea for protection, an officer on the next boat wrote a note on a piece of paper, but nobody ever followed up. Another said that an officer told him their claims would be heard later. But there were no more interviews. “We had no opportunity,” a woman in the group says. When I asked the Coast Guard about this, a spokesperson told me the agency meticulously documents all claims. “Since we do not have a record of any of those migrants communicating that they feared for their lives if returned to Haiti, I cannot say that they made MOF claims while aboard,” he said.

    Tcherry fell asleep on the larger cutter and woke at around dawn to commotion. He saw an EMT pressing on the chest of a middle-aged woman who lay several yards away from him. She had been moaning in pain the night before. The crew member keeping watch had found her dead, her nose and mouth covered in blood. Another Haitian woman began to sing a hymn as the EMT performing CPR cried. A small boat took the woman’s body away and then returned for another man who had been complaining of pain and could not urinate. “I thought they would take us to land after the woman had died,” Tcherry says. “I thought they would let us go.” But that afternoon, he was transferred to yet another cutter that pulled away from Florida and into the high seas. Tcherry finally understood he was being sent back.

    The Coast Guard was first deployed as a maritime border-patrol agency to stop an earlier surge of migration from Haiti. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan made a deal with Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, that allowed the Coast Guard to stop and board Haitian boats and deliver those detained directly back to Haiti. They would be processed on Coast Guard cutters, far from lawyers who could review their cases. The order, advocates argued at the time, undermined U.N. refugee protections and a U.S. refugee-and-asylum law that Congress passed just the year before. “This effort to push borders into the world’s oceans was new, and it marked a perverse paradigm shift,” Jeffrey Kahn, a legal scholar at the University of California, Davis, wrote recently.

    A decade after the Reagan agreement, as Haitians again departed en masse following a military coup, the George H.W. Bush administration further buttressed the sea wall. Bush signed an order that said federal agencies had no obligation to consider asylum claims from Haitians caught in international waters, no matter the evidence of danger or persecution. Lawyers and activists protested, calling the maritime regime a wholesale abdication of human rights doctrine. But the Bush order still stands. By the mid-1990s, its reach expanded to nearly anyone of any nationality caught in the sea, whether out in international waters or a couple of hundred feet from the beach.

    Pushing migrants and refugees away from the land borders to avoid obligations under law has now become common practice. In the United States, consecutive policies under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have attempted to cast whole swaths of the land south of the border as a legal no-man’s land like the ocean. They have outsourced deterrence, detention and deportation to Mexico and Central America. Trump and Biden have sought to bar people from seeking asylum if they don’t first try to apply for protection in countries they pass through on their way to the United States. Europe, for its part, has pushed people coming by boat through the Mediterranean back to North African shores, where countries have imposed brutal regimes of deterrence.

    None of those measures have prevented the latest wave of migration from the Caribbean. In January, amid a generational spike in Haitians and Cubans held on their cutters, the Coast Guard acknowledged that crew members were reaching a breaking point. “We are in extremis,” a senior official wrote to colleagues in a widely circulated internal email in January. “I know you and your teams are pushed beyond limits.” The head of the Coast Guard for the eastern half of the United States, Vice Adm. Kevin Lunday, wrote in February to colleagues that two outside experts had told him their crews were under extreme stress similar to the levels experienced in “sustained combat operations.”

    Coast Guard members told me they had become accustomed to retrieving corpses from capsized boats, worn down by water or gnawed on by sharks. It was not uncommon to walk down a stairway or into a bunk room and come upon a crew member sobbing. Crew members waited months for mental health appointments, and the agency was talking openly about suicide prevention. “I don’t see how the current level of operations is sustainable,” Capt. Chris Cederholm, the commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Miami, wrote to colleagues, “without the breaking of several of our people.” Some were struggling with what one former crew member called a “moral dilemma,” because they had begun to understand that the job required them to inflict suffering on others. “We hear their stories, people who say they’d rather we shoot them right here than send them back to what they’re running from,” one Coast Guard member says. “And then we send them all back.”

    Tim James told me he tried to take his mind off the job by lifting weights and frequenting a cigar bar where service members and cops go to talk about “the suck,” but he soon realized he needed more than weights or whiskey to reckon with the mounting stress, even despair. “I go home, and I feel guilty,” he told me, “because I don’t have to worry about somebody kicking in my front door, you know, I don’t have to worry about the military roaming the streets.” He sought mental health support from a new “resiliency support team” the agency created. But James had not been able to shake the memories of the children he detained, particularly one 7-year-old Haitian girl with small braids. She’d been wearing shorts and a tank top, her feet were bare and she smiled at James whenever their eyes caught. “My mom is dead,” she told James with the help of an older child who spoke a little English. “I want to go to my auntie in Miami.”

    In the girl’s belongings the crew found a piece of paper with a phone number she said was her aunt’s. After James interviewed her, they sent her unaccompanied-minor questionnaire to the district office in Florida, and they waited for instructions on what to do with her. Out on the deck, James couldn’t help hoping she’d be taken to shore, to her aunt. But late in the morning the next day, the crew received a list from an office in Washington, D.C., of the people to be sent back. The girl was on the list. James cried on the return trip to port. One of his own daughters was about the girl’s age. “I can’t imagine sending my 7-year-old little kid across an ocean that is unforgiving,” James told me, nearly in tears. “I can’t imagine what my life would be like to have to do that.”

    That was just weeks before he encountered Tcherry, Claire and Beana. So when Peterson admitted the children were alone, the news came as a blow. “It’s a pretty hard hit when you think the kids have somebody and then it turns out that they really don’t,” James told me. He could see that Tcherry thought he would be making it to shore. “To see the hope on his face and then have to kind of turn around and destroy that is tough,” James told me. He never learns what becomes of the people he transfers off his cutter: that the pregnant woman gave birth in a hospital to a healthy boy and has an asylum case pending; that the body of Guerline Tulus, the woman who died on the cutter of what the medical examiner concluded was an embolism, remains in a Miami morgue, and that authorities have not identified any next of kin. He does not know what happened to the three children after they were sent back, but many months later, he says, he still wonders about them.

    Tcherry followed Claire and Beana up a rickety ramp in the port of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, past a seized blue and yellow cargo ship into the Haitian Coast Guard station. The ground was littered with plastic U.S. Coast Guard bracelets that previous groups of people had pulled off and thrown to the ground. Officials from the Haitian child-protection authority and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration watched as Tcherry and the rest of the group disembarked. “They looked scared and they said they were hungry,” a veteran official at IBESR, the Haitian child-protection agency, who was working at the port that day told me. “As a Haitian, I feel humiliated,” he says, “but we can’t really do anything about it. We’ve resigned ourselves.” To him, the people the Americans offloaded in Haiti always looked half dead. “It seems to me that when those children fall in their hands, they should know how to treat them. But that’s not the case.”

    Tcherry’s throat hurt and his legs were weak. He had never felt such tiredness. He ate as much as he could from the warm plate of food the UN provided. Slumped over on a bench, he waited for his turn to use the shower in a white and blue wash shed on the edge of a fenced lot behind the Haitian Coast Guard station. The officials brought several people to a hospital and got to work figuring out what to do with the unaccompanied children.

    The U.S. Coast Guard and State Department say that the children they send back are transferred into the hands of local authorities responsible for the care of children. “When we have custodial protection of those children, we want to make sure that the necessary steps are taken,” Lt. Cmdr. John Beal, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told me, “to ensure that when we repatriate those migrants, they don’t end up in some nefarious actor’s custody or something.” But no U.S. agency would explain the actual precautions the U.S. government takes to keep children from ending up in the wrong hands, beyond initial screenings aboard cutters. Last year, the Coast Guard stopped tracking the “reception agency” in each country, because according to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government has set up rules establishing which agencies take these children and no longer needs to track them on a case-by-case basis.

    Haitian child-protection officials in Cap-Haïtien say their agency always finds relatives to take children, though sometimes after weeks or months. But the official with one of the other agencies involved in the processing of returned and deported Haitians at the Cap-Haïtien port said this claim is simply not true. The official said that children have departed the port with adults and with older children without any agency confirming they have an actual relationship or connection. “This is a serious concern in terms of trafficking,” the official told me. IBESR said those claims were unfounded. “According to the procedure, every child who leaves the port is accompanied by someone,” the IBESR official said, adding that when possible, the agency follows up with families to make sure children arrive safely. But the agency acknowledged there are limits to the support it can provide because of a lack of resources.
    Before they left the cutter, Peterson told Tcherry and the sisters that he would take care of them until they could contact their parents, who would figure out where they needed to go. Tcherry agreed. Peterson later told me he’d thought carefully about whether he wanted to get involved in the kids’ affairs once they were off the boat. He’d talked to other adults onboard, and they all agreed that someone needed to step up, that the Haitian government was surely not to be trusted. “If I didn’t do it,” Peterson says, “they would remain with the Haitian state, with all the risks that they could’ve faced, including kidnapping.”

    Peterson told the child-protection agency that he was the children’s guardian. The officials said they would need to contact the parents to confirm, so Peterson did the only thing he could think to do: He called the man who had been his conduit to the boat out of the Bahamas. The man sent him photos of the children’s IDs and put Peterson in touch with Claire and Beana’s mother, Inose Jean, in Michigan. She screamed and cried with relief upon learning her daughters were alive. Peterson explained that he’d taken care of the girls at sea and he asked her what to do with them. She said she would call back. Two hours later, she instructed Peterson to take the girls to her friend’s house in Cap-Haïtien.

    But Peterson still had no number for Tcherry’s mother. So he told the officials that Tcherry was Claire and Beana’s cousin, and that he’d gotten the image of Tcherry’s ID from Inose Jean. At dusk, Peterson walked with the three children through the metal gate of the Haitian Coast Guard station, at once incensed and relieved that he’d been allowed to take them. “The Haitian authorities didn’t talk to the children’s mothers,” Peterson says. “There was not enough evidence to actually prove I was who I was, or to prove a relationship.” They took a taxi to Jean’s friend’s house, and Claire, who recognized the woman from years earlier, rushed into her arms.

    The woman agreed to let Tcherry spend a night there. Peterson went to a cheap hotel with spotty electricity and a dirty pool. The man in the Bahamas finally sent Peterson Tcherry’s mother’s number. “I am the person who stood up to care for Tcherry on the boat,” Peterson told LaFortune. She collapsed onto the bed in her room, the only piece of furniture in the Toronto apartment she shared with her husband and her daughter. She had spent the last six days in a terrified daze, calling the people in the Bahamas she’d paid, begging for any news and fighting images in her mind of her son sinking into the sea. The next morning, after Tcherry woke, Peterson called LaFortune again. Tcherry looked weak and his voice was frail and hoarse. “When will I be with you, Mommy?” he asked.

    LaFortune did not for a moment consider trying to put Tcherry on another boat. She told him she would wait until she got asylum in Canada and send for him legally. But Haiti was even more dangerous for Tcherry than when he’d left. One man who was detained with Tcherry, whom I interviewed in Haiti two weeks after he returned there, said he feared he would be killed if he left Cap-Haïtien for his home in Port-au-Prince. After he ran through the roughly $50 the U.N. agency gave each of the returnees, which he used for a hotel, he did go back and was attacked on the street as he traveled to a hospital, he said, to get medicine for his daughter. He sent me photographs of gashes on his body. A second man sent me photos of a deep head wound that he suffered during an attack by the very armed men he had said he was running from. Another woman from the boat who told me she fled because she was raped says she is now “in hiding” in Port-au-Prince, living with relatives and her daughter, whom she does not allow to leave the house.

    Others on the boat have been luckier. In late 2022, the Department of Homeland Security started an unusually broad new legal-immigration program that now allows Haitians and Cubans, along with Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, to apply for two-year entry permits on humanitarian grounds from their countries, rather than traveling by land or sea first. The Department of Homeland Security says that since the program began, it has processed 30,000 people a month. More than 107,000 Haitians and 57,000 Cubans have been approved for entry, including a man who was detained with Tcherry. On Oct. 18, he stepped off a plane in Fort Lauderdale with a legal entry permit. He made it just under the wire, given the timing of his interdiction in February. In late April, DHS added a caveat to the new program: Anyone stopped at sea from then on would be ineligible to apply to the parole program. The Coast Guard says the new program and the accompanying restriction have caused the numbers of Cubans and Haitians departing on boats to fall back down to their pre-2021 level. “People have a safe and lawful alternative,” Beal, the Coast Guard’s spokesperson in Florida, told me, “so they don’t feel their only option is to take to the sea.”

    Tcherry rode a bus with Peterson over the mountains to Saint-Marc. In the stucco house on a quiet street where Peterson lived with his fiancée and her parents, Tcherry struggled to stop thinking about his experience at sea. “When I sleep, when I sit down, I want to cry,” Tcherry told me days after his arrival there. “They had us for five days. We couldn’t eat well, couldn’t sleep well. Couldn’t brush our teeth.” He thought of his body soaked from the sea spray, of the woman who died. Although Peterson assured him it was not true, Tcherry kept wondering if the officers had just thrown her body into the sea. “He is having nightmares about the boats,” Peterson told me a week after their arrival, “reliving the same moment again and again, and he starts crying.”

    LaFortune told Tcherry that she was arranging for him to travel to his grandmother in another part of the country. But it soon became clear to her that the roads were too dangerous, spotted with gang and vigilante checkpoints guarded often by men carrying AK-47s. Peterson told LaFortune that Tcherry could stay with him as long as she needed him to. But as the weeks turned to months, Tcherry felt that Peterson began to change. He said Peterson needed money, and he was asking Tcherry’s mother to send more and more. Peterson was frequently out of the house, working odd jobs, and often could not answer LaFortune’s calls. She grew worried. When she did talk to Tcherry, he was as quiet as he was in the smuggler’s house in the Bahamas.

    Two months passed. LaFortune’s asylum case was denied, and she and her husband appealed. Four more months passed. LaFortune’s husband heard news that gangs were closing in on Saint-Marc. LaFortune decided that they must move Tcherry, that it was time to risk the journey on the roads. In September, she sent an old family friend to collect him. They rode on a bus through a checkpoint where the driver paid a fee to a masked man. “I saw a man holding his gun,” Tcherry says. The man made a sign that they could pass.

    Tcherry arrived at a busy bus station in Port-au-Prince and looked for his grandmother. He saw her in a crowd and remembered her face, her high forehead and wide smile. “That is my grandma,” he said, again and again. His mutters turned to song. “That is my grandmother, tololo, tololo, that is my grandmother.” He sank into her arms. He held her hand as they boarded another bus and passed through another checkpoint, back to where he began.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/when-the-coast-guard-intercepts-unaccompanied-kids

    –—

    Reprise du #modèle_australien et son concept de l’#excision_territoriale :

    “People intercepted at sea, even in U.S. waters, have fewer rights than those who come by land. “Asylum does not apply at sea,” a Coast Guard spokesperson told me. Even people who are fleeing violence, rape and death, who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled.”

    Excision territoriale :

    https://seenthis.net/messages/416996
    #Australie

    #droits #mer #terre #USA #Etats-Unis #asile #migrations #réfugiés #MNA #mineurs_non_accompagnés #enfants #enfance #Haïti #réfugiés_haïtiens

    via @freakonometrics

  • Mohamed Habib Diallo, ambassadeur du Sénégal au Qatar : « Il n’y a pas de clandestins ici, les deux pays discutent sur… »
    https://www.dakaractu.com/Mohamed-Habib-Diallo-ambassadeur-du-Senegal-au-Qatar-Il-n-y-a-pas-de-clan

    Mohamed Habib Diallo, ambassadeur du Sénégal au Qatar : « Il n’y a pas de clandestins ici, les deux pays discutent sur… »
    L’ambassadeur du Sénégal au Qatar a révélé que les deux pays discutent pour faciliter l’arrivée de travailleurs sénégalais au Qatar. Les Sénégalais comptent au total 260 compatriotes. Un nombre infime par rapport aux autres pays Africains qui se comptent par milliers. Ainsi, l’offre d’emploi étant grande, les deux pays sont en train de trouver des subterfuges pour augmenter le nombre de Sénégalais au Qatar. « Le ministre du travail Qatari s’attèle pour faciliter l’arrivée de compatriotes Sénégalais car l’offre de l’emploi existe. Beaucoup de pays limitrophes sont bien représentés. Les 260 sénégalais sont infimes et la plupart sont soit des étudiants, des sportifs ou des professionnels », souligne Mohamed Habib Diallo.
    L’ambassadeur souligne que les difficultés que rencontrent les sénégalais sont relatives à leur intégration, la barrière linguistique et le coût élevé du billet d’avion…

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#senegal#qatar#travailleurmigrant#etudiant#economie#emploi

  • Claire Hédon, Défenseure des droits : « Le projet de “loi immigration” sacrifie les droits fondamentaux des étrangers »
    https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/12/09/claire-hedon-defenseure-des-droits-le-projet-de-loi-immigration-sacrifie-les

    Claire Hédon, Défenseure des droits : « Le projet de “loi immigration” sacrifie les droits fondamentaux des étrangers »
    Tribune
    Un équilibre doit exister entre le pouvoir des Etats de décider des règles d’entrée et de séjour sur le territoire et la protection des droits et libertés. Or le texte débattu à l’Assemblée bouleverse cet équilibre, en bafouant la dignité et l’égalité, estime la Défenseure des droits dans une tribune au « Monde ».
    Lundi 11 décembre, un texte d’une gravité majeure pour les droits fondamentaux des étrangers doit être discuté à l’Assemblée nationale. Dès sa présentation par le gouvernement, j’ai alerté sur les nombreuses atteintes aux droits et libertés comprises dans le projet de loi « pour contrôler l’immigration, améliorer l’intégration ». La surenchère démagogique lors des débats parlementaires, notamment au Sénat, les a aggravées au mépris des obligations constitutionnelles et internationales de l’Etat.
    En premier lieu, au nom de l’objectif légitime de sauvegarde de l’ordre public et de lutte contre l’immigration irrégulière, le projet de loi supprime nombre de garanties actuellement prévues pour protéger les droits fondamentaux des étrangers. Il accroît en outre, avec une acception particulièrement extensive de l’ordre public, les possibilités de refus ou retrait du droit au séjour, y compris pour des personnes n’ayant fait l’objet d’aucune condamnation pénale. L’éloignement des étrangers se trouverait ainsi très largement remis à l’appréciation de l’administration, au risque de multiplier des décisions arbitraires.
    La grave fragilisation du droit au séjour qui en résulterait serait d’autant plus préoccupante que le droit au juge est amoindri. En particulier, la réforme du contentieux envisagée par le projet maintient, dans de nombreux cas, des délais de recours extrêmement brefs, compliquant de fait l’accès au juge.
    En deuxième lieu, le texte accrédite l’idée, pourtant démentie par de nombreuses études, selon laquelle des conditions d’accueil « trop favorables » encourageraient l’immigration irrégulière ou l’installation durable d’étrangers sur le territoire. Omniprésent dans le débat parlementaire, ce discours a poussé le législateur à envisager des restrictions de nombreux droits, notamment pour les personnes particulièrement vulnérables.
    Je pense d’abord au droit d’asile, avec la multiplication des possibilités de rejet des demandes sans examen au fond, couplée à une extension de la procédure à juge unique devant la Cour nationale du droit d’asile. Je pense ensuite, au droit au séjour des étrangers malades, réservé aux cas où le traitement requis n’existe pas du tout dans le pays d’origine sans vérification par ailleurs des possibilités d’accès effectif au traitement. Cette disposition conduirait à une nette diminution des admissions au séjour pour soins, au détriment de la santé des personnes concernées et alors même que ce motif d’admission au séjour représente une part infime des titres de séjour délivrés (environ 1,5 %).
    Je pense enfin au déploiement renforcé, en outremer, d’un droit dérogatoire, concourant à la pérennisation, sur le territoire de la République, de zones de moindres droits, y compris pour les étrangers qui y sont régulièrement établis, voire pour les Français lorsqu’ils y fondent une famille avec des étrangers. En troisième lieu, la politique d’intégration promue par le texte inverse le rapport entre l’obtention d’un titre de séjour et l’intégration.
    Autrefois conçue comme permettant, par sa stabilité, une meilleure intégration, la carte de résident de dix ans est devenue le titre d’exception, délivré en récompense ultime d’une intégration jugée réussie. Le projet de loi vient approfondir cette logique en subordonnant l’accès aux titres de séjour de longue durée à la justification d’une maîtrise suffisante de la langue française ainsi qu’à la réussite à un examen d’évaluation de la connaissance de la société française et de ses principes.
    Mon institution, autorité indépendante inscrite dans la Constitution, chargée de veiller au respect des droits et libertés, est le témoin quotidien de l’extrême dégradation des droits des étrangers vivant en France. La défaillance des services préfectoraux y contribue largement : il ne s’agit pas ici de mettre en cause le travail des agents publics, mais de constater que le manque d’interlocuteur humain et surtout les délais d’attente pour l’obtention ou le simple renouvellement d’un titre de séjour se sont considérablement aggravés depuis la dématérialisation des guichets engagée à marche forcée, sans renforcement des moyens des préfectures.
    Des milliers d’étrangers présents en France, parfois depuis des décennies, se retrouvent en situation irrégulière du fait de cette défaillance. Surtout, les ruptures de droits subies (pertes d’emploi et de droits sociaux) sont dramatiques et provoquent une précarité insoutenable. Les parcours de vie sont gravement et irrémédiablement entravés.
    Un équilibre doit exister entre, d’une part, le droit souverain des Etats de décider des règles d’entrée et de séjour sur le territoire en tenant compte de l’impératif de sauvegarde de l’ordre public et, d’autre part, la nécessaire protection des droits fondamentaux. Le projet de loi bouleverse profondément cet équilibre, au profit de nouvelles formes d’ostracisme et au détriment de principes juridiques essentiels, en particulier les principes de dignité et d’égalité. Cette rupture dans la protection des droits et libertés en France emporterait des effets néfastes pour la cohésion sociale et l’intérêt général.

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#france#droit#etranger#defenseurdesdroits#loimigration#immigration#egalité#droitsouverain#territoire#protection

  • Au Texas, la Cour suprême suspend une autorisation d’avortement
    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/12/09/au-texas-la-cour-supreme-suspend-une-autorisation-d-avortement_6204806_3210.


    Molly Duane, avocate du Center for Reproductive Rights, qui représente Kate Cox, devant le tribunal d’Austin, le 19 juillet, dans le cadre d’une précédente affaire. SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP

    La Cour suprême de cet Etat américain très conservateur a suspendu, vendredi, la décision d’une juge qui avait autorisé, la veille, une femme de 31 ans à la grossesse très risquée à bénéficier d’un avortement.

    Le Monde avec AP et AFP

    La Cour suprême de l’Etat américain conservateur du Texas a empêché, vendredi 8 décembre, une femme à la grossesse très risquée de bénéficier d’un avortement, ont rapporté des médias américains.

    Elle avait été saisie par le procureur général Ken Paxton en vue d’empêcher Kate Cox d’avoir recours à l’interruption volontaire de grossesse (IVG). Dans une ordonnance d’une page, le tribunal a annoncé qu’il suspendait temporairement la décision, sans se prononcer sur le fond.

    Jeudi, Maya Guerra Gamble, une juge du Texas, avait autorisé cette femme de 31 ans – dont la grossesse pourrait, selon son médecin, menacer sa vie et sa fertilité – à recourir à l’IVG ; une décision remarquable dans cet Etat qui interdit l’avortement sauf très rares exceptions, une des législations les plus strictes en la matière aux Etats-Unis.
    Lire aussi : Une juge du Texas autorise une femme à la grossesse très risquée à avorter

    Kate Cox, enceinte de vingt semaines lorsqu’elle a poursuivi le Texas pour obtenir le droit d’avorter, avait eu la confirmation que son fœtus était atteint de trisomie 18, une anomalie chromosomique associée à des malformations graves. Selon ses arguments, elle présente une très forte probabilité de fausse couche ou de mortinatalité et de faibles taux de survie. En outre, les médecins lui ont déclaré que si le rythme cardiaque du fœtus s’arrêtait, déclencher l’accouchement entraînerait un risque de rupture utérine en raison de ses deux césariennes antérieures, et qu’une autre césarienne mettrait en danger sa capacité à porter un autre enfant.

    « Sans tenir compte du fond, la cour suspend administrativement la décision du tribunal de district » qui permettait à Mme Cox d’avorter, explique le Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) qui représente la jeune femme devant la justice. Le CRR est un groupe de défense de droits tels que l’avortement, situé à New York et actif sur tout le territoire américain.

    Une plainte dans le Kentucky
    « Nous espérons toujours que la cour rejettera en fin de compte la demande de l’Etat et qu’elle le fera rapidement », explique Molly Duane, l’avocate principale du CRR. Elle craint que le report de la décision de justice soit synonyme de refus. Mme Cox a besoin de « soins médicaux urgents. C’est la raison pour laquelle les gens ne devraient pas avoir à supplier [d’obtenir] des soins médicaux devant un tribunal », a-t-elle déclaré.

    « La loi texane interdit les avortements volontaires », a déclaré, de son côté, le procureur général, un républicain ultraconservateur, qui avance que les arguments de Mme Cox ne répondent pas aux critères d’une exception médicale à l’interdiction de l’avortement dans l’Etat. Il a appelé la Cour suprême du Texas à « suspendre » la décision de la juge Guerra Gamble, affirmant qu’elle avait « abusé de son pouvoir » sans « aucune preuve ».

    Dans un communiqué assorti d’une lettre adressée à des établissements hospitaliers, M. Paxton avait mis en garde, jeudi, des hôpitaux du Texas que, malgré la décision de la juge qu’il qualifie de « militante », ils pourraient faire face à des conséquences juridiques s’ils autorisaient le médecin de Mme Cox à pratiquer l’avortement.

    A l’été 2022, la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis avait cassé son arrêt Roe vs Wade, qui garantissait depuis un demi-siècle le droit fédéral des Américaines à interrompre leur grossesse. Depuis, une vingtaine d’Etats ont interdit l’avortement ou l’ont très fortement restreint, comme le Texas, qui n’autorise les IVG qu’en cas de danger de mort ou de risque de grave handicap pour la mère.

    Vendredi, une femme enceinte du Kentucky, où l’IVG est aussi interdit, a également déposé une plainte exigeant le droit à l’avortement. Contrairement au procès de Mme Cox, cette plainte cherche à obtenir le statut de recours collectif pour inclure d’autres habitantes de l’Etat qui sont (ou vont devenir) enceintes et souhaitent avorter.

    #IVG #CRR #Cour_suprême_du_Texas

  • Comment la filière maraîchère bretonne a recours à des travailleurs africains souvent sans papiers, et sous-payés

    Les migrants venus d’Afrique, souvent sans titre de_séjour, sont devenus un rouage essentiel de la #filière maraîchère bretonne. Dans les environs de #Lannion, aucun des producteurs qui les emploient n’a accepté de répondre aux questions d’"Envoyé spécial", mais une inspectrice du travail a souhaité dénoncer l’hypocrisie qui règne, selon elle, dans le secteur.

    En Bretagne, de juillet à octobre, c’est la récolte des célèbres #cocos_de_Paimpol. Comme les #étudiants et les #retraités français n’y suffisent plus, les maraîchers ont de plus en plus souvent recours à des #travailleurs_étrangers. Dans ce champ près de Lannion où s’est rendue une équipe d’"Envoyé spécial", assis sur une chaise sept heures par jour à ramasser les haricots, des Maliens, Camerounais, Guinéens... tous les travailleurs sont africains.

    « Les Africains, eux, ils ne connaissent pas de sot métier. Vous, les Français, vous avez honte peut-être de travailler dans les cocos, mais nous, on ne choisit pas. » (Un travailleur agricole africain, employé dans un champ de haricots en Bretagne)

    Ils affirment être déclarés par le propriétaire du champ qui les emploie, mais aucun ne semble avoir de papiers français. Seraient-ils employés illégalement ?

    Toute la filière maraîchère bretonne a recours à ces travailleurs africains, afghans ou syriens, devenus des « #saisonniers_permanents ». Aucun producteur local ne veut le reconnaître ouvertement, et tous ceux que les journalistes ont contactés ont refusé de répondre à leurs questions. La coopérative locale a même prévenu certains maraîchers, par SMS, de la présence d’une équipe d’"Envoyé spécial" cherchant à « récupérer des informations concernant la #main-d'œuvre_étrangère », avec ce conseil : « Soyez vigilants et renvoyez vers la coopérative ». Laquelle a elle aussi décliné les demandes d’interview...

    Seule une inspectrice du travail a accepté de s’exprimer, sous couvert d’anonymat. Elle veut dénoncer l’#hypocrisie qui règne, selon elle, dans le secteur : « Tout le monde ferme les yeux. Il n’y a pas que les services de l’Etat, c’est les agriculteurs, c’est tout le monde. »

    « Il n’y a pas de #main-d’œuvre française qui veut faire ce travail, parce que ce n’est pas rémunérateur. » (Une inspectrice du travail, qui témoigne anonymement dans « Envoyé spécial »)

    L’inspectrice ne nie pas que les agriculteurs déclarent leurs salariés, mais sans avoir les moyens de vérifier leur identité. Ce qui n’est pas facile, précise-t-elle, car ces travailleurs étrangers « ne sont pas forcément sans titre, mais ils ont des ’alias’ ... » (ils utilisent par exemple la carte d’identité d’un proche).

    Des travailleurs maintenus dans la #précarité

    D’après elle, beaucoup de producteurs ont intérêt à maintenir dans la précarité ces travailleurs étrangers, souvent sous-payés, voire exploités. « Comment voulez-vous revendiquer dans ces conditions-là ? » demande-t-elle. Si on lui donne 500 euros au lieu des 1 200 euros dus (l’#ouvrier_de_cueillette est censé percevoir l’équivalent du smic, voire davantage, selon le poids des denrées récoltées), « il est obligé d’accepter. A qui il va aller se plaindre ? On va lui dire ’Mais c’est même pas vous, Monsieur, c’est votre alias !’ C’est un no man’s land. »

    https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-magazine/france-2/envoye-special/video-tout-le-monde-ferme-les-yeux-comment-la-filiere-maraichere-breton

    #maraîchage #Bretagne #sans-papiers #France #travail #conditions_de_travail #exploitation #salaire #migrations #agriculture

    ping @karine4

  • Un commentaire de lecteur approfondi sur la guerre en #Ukraine et la destruction du concept d’#Europe par les #États-Unis

    https://lostineu.eu/hoffnung-auf-europa-schwindet-orban-bei-macron-und-die-spur-des-geldes

    Il faut à mon avis rendre hommage aux Etats-Unis. Avec la guerre en Ukraine, qu’ils ont préparée stratégiquement depuis longtemps selon le scénario de Brezinski, ils voulaient à tout prix élargir l’écart entre la Russie et le cœur de l’Europe afin d’écarter toute concurrence imminente. Ils ont aujourd’hui atteint cet objectif de manière si complète et durable que, dorénavant, plus aucune herbe ne pourra pousser entre l’Europe, et en particulier l’#Allemagne, et la #Russie. …

    • der vollständige Kommentar:

      Man muss den USA hier m.E. Respekt zollen. Mit dem Ukrainekrieg, den sie von langer Hand strategisch nach dem Drehbuch von Brezinski vorbereitet haben, wollten sie den Abstand zwischen Russland und Kerneuropa wieder vergrößern, um sich drohende Konkurrenz vom Leibe zu halten. Sie haben diese Ziel Stand heute so umfassend und nachhaltig erreicht, dass bis auf weiteres kein Gras mehr zwischen Europa und insbesondere Deutschland und Russland wachsen kann.

      Um dieses Ergebnis zu erzielen haben die USA bisher nur überschaubare Mittel aufgeboten. Fünf Milliarden Euro zur Bewerkstelligung des Maidan (nach Auskunft von Frau Nuland), ein paar Ladungen abgängiger Waffensysteme ein ein paar zig Milliarden für den Krieg und die Stützung des Staates Ukraine. Ein Teil der Waffenlieferungen der USA dürfte nicht einmal unentgeltlich erfolgt sein, sonst hätte es keiner #Lend&Lease Beschlüsse in den USA bedurft.

      Auf dem weg sind die USA die verhassten #Nordstream Pipelines losgeworden. Nicht nur, dass sie dafür Sündenböcke parat haben. Sie haben sogar bewirkt, dass sich unter den Regierungen Europas nicht eine einzige findet, die die richtigen Fragen stellt und den Willen zur Aufklärung aufbringt.

      Jetzt ziehen sich die USA zum bestmöglichen Zeitpunkt zurück. der Konflikt ist aktuell kaum durch Verhandlungen auflösbar. Russland hat gewonnen und wird die Bedingungen diktieren können. Das Verhältnis Russlands zu Europa ist zerrüttet. Und die richtig großen Geldausgaben stehen erst noch vor der Tür, namentlich der Wiederaufbau und die Alimentierung der Ukraine und die Sicherung einer drastisch vergrößerten und extren gefährlich gewordenen Grenze nach Russland. All dies wird Europa zu bezahlen haben. Zuzüglich der Entgelte für die US-Waffenlieferungen (Lend&Lease).

      Das Glanzstück ist aber, dass die EU ernsthaft die Aufnahme der Ukraine anstrebt, während der #Nato Beitritt schon fast abmoderiert wurde. Dadurch wird es für #Europa unmöglich, sich diesem Fass ohne Boden zu entziehen und der Graben nach Russland wird noch einmal deutlich vertieft. Und die USA können ihr Spiel über die Nato weitertreiben, ohne dafür signifikant geradestehen zu müssen.

      #Putin hat schon verlautbart, dass er sich konstruktive Politik mit den USA womöglich nach dem Krieg noch vorstellen kann, mit Europa bis auf weiteres nicht. Von daher wird es schon wieder Geschäfts der #USA mit #Russland geben, während Europa mit schmutzigen #LNG aus den USA und teurer Energie seine Wettbewerbsfähigkeit verspielt hat und seine Industrie Richtung USA verliert.

      Ich habe in meinem inzwischen nicht ganz kurzen Leben noch niemals gesehen, wie man seinen Karren mit soviel Zielstrebigkeit und Vehemenz strategisch gegen die Wand und gleichzeitig tief in den Morast fahren kann, wie es unsere #EU-Elite flankiert von unserer Bundesregierung gemacht hat.

  • Alec Karakatsanis sur X : "The first time I asked for an undocumented client to be unshackled in court to hug his family one last time before being imprisoned and deported, a lawyer from the “Department of Justice” stood up and objected “on behalf of the United States.”" / X
    https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1732763627554328657

    The first time I asked for an undocumented client to be unshackled in court to hug his family one last time before being imprisoned and deported, a lawyer from the “Department of Justice” stood up and objected “on behalf of the United States.”

    #états-unis

  • Sur les extraordinaires agissements de Karim Khan de la CPI.

    Mouin Rabbani sur X : https://twitter.com/MouinRabbani/status/1731544662454731077

    THREAD: To understand why International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan’s conduct regarding “The Situation in Palestine” is so scandalous and should disqualify him from office, a little background is necessary.

    Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute, and is not a State Party (i.e. member state) of the ICC, the global tribunal established in 2002 to hold accountable perpetrators of war crimes, crimes of aggression, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

    Of specific concern to Israel was that the Rome Statute, in Article 8.2.(b).(viii), defines as a “war crime” the “transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the occupied territory within or outside this territory”.

    This closely reflects Article 49 of the IV Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which defines such activities as a “grave breach”, the Convention’s equivalent of a war crime. Other articles, such as 7.1.(j) which defines “apartheid” as “a crime against humanity”, became a serious concern more recently, as the longstanding judgement of Palestinians on this matter was endorsed by the leading Israeli and international human rights organizations.

    The ICC is only empowered to prosecute individuals, not states. (The conduct of states is adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, a separate institution also located in The Hague).

    The Office of the ICC Prosecutor can conduct investigations into alleged violations of the Rome Statute only if either 1) a case is referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 2) requested by at least one ICC member state, or 3) initiated by the Prosecutor, provided it is authorized to move forward by a panel of ICC judges known as the “pre-trial chamber”.

    Given that the US, which like Israel refused to join the ICC, has veto powers at the Security Council, and that Palestine was not an ICC member, Israel was not particularly concerned that the ICC Prosecutor would independently seek to initiate an investigation of its conduct.

    So it sufficed with periodic tirades dismissing, demonizing, and delegitimizing the Court. That began to change in 2015 when Palestine, which has the status of Permanent Observer State at the UN, was admitted to the ICC and permitted to formally ratify the Rome Statute.

    The Palestinian leadership had for many years stalled on this and other initiatives promoting the application of international law to the Palestinians. This was, parenthetically, not out of fear of potential ICC prosecutions of Palestinians.

    Hamas, whose members are the most likely to be prosecuted if the ICC investigates Palestinian violations, in fact called for Palestine’s accession to the ICC, in both word and writing.

    In writing, because Hamas propaganda had been denouncing Abbas for promoting Palestine’s ICC application at a snail’s pace out of fear of the Israeli and Western response.

    Abbas responded by insisting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad sign a document supporting the application before it was submitted, so he could not later be accused by them of joining the Court in order to have his rivals extradited to The Hague.

    When the deed was done, Palestinians from across the political spectrum welcomed it, and stated they were prepared to see all alleged violations of the Rome Statute committed in Palestine investigated by the ICC.

    Hamas’s criticisms of Abbas may have been propaganda, but they were also correct. Israel and its US and European sponsors had from the outset made clear their opposition to Palestine seeking to join the ICC, and demanded that it desist.

    The Europeans, who unlike the US and Israel have joined the ICC, were in a particular pickle. As a European diplomat stated to me at the time: “We don’t want the Palestinians to put is in a position where we have to choose between our commitment to international law and our commitment to Israel”. In other words, they didn’t want to expose the rotten core of their rules-based international order, where the rules only apply to everyone else. When they failed to prevent Palestinian accession, Israel in particular went berserk. It began withholding Palestinian taxes it was legally obliged to transfer to the Palestinian Authority, imposed a variety of restrictions on Palestinian officials, and threatened to punish the PA in multiple additional ways. The US also made its displeasure clear, but directed the brunt of its retaliatory measures directly at the ICC.

    Washington at one imposed sanctions on Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, normally reserved for designated criminals. It was Washington’s way of informing the ICC it had no right to investigate either Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians or US conduct in Afghanistan.

    In 2002 the US had already adopted legislation known as The Hague Invasion Act, which authorizes the US military to invade The Netherlands, a fellow NATO member, and free any US citizen in ICC custody.

    Not clear how Nato’s collective defense provisions enshrined in Article 5 would operate under such circumstances….

    The Europeans, duplicitous as ever, kept confirming their support for the ICC while submitting vacuous legal arguments to the Court insisting it had no jurisdiction over Palestine.

    In doing so they came within a hair of endorsing Israel’s position that the ICC is an illegitimate body. The Dutch government for its part indicated it could not take a position on the matter because as the state that hosts the ICC,

    it was obliged to preserve its neutrality in such matters. Yet several years later it demonstratively awarded the ICC several million Euro to support its investigation of Russian conduct in Ukraine, an initiative it repeatedly and publicly endorsed.

    In the event, the Palestinians in 2015 submitted an application to the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to investigate violations of the Rome Statute in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967, beginning in 2014.

    The Court wasted years adjudicating matters of jurisdiction and competence, before finally confirming, in 2021, that it had a mandate to conduct an investigation.

    Which brings us back to the scandal known as Karim Khan. In previous functions, for example investigating the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and that by ISIS in Iraq, he developed a reputation as an attention whore of sorts.

    Didn’t achieve much by way of results, but always found his way to the television cameras. A British citizen, his candidacy as ICC Prosecutor was energetically supported by the UK government. His candidacy was also championed by the US and Israel, two non-member states opposed to the very existence of the Court. In 2021, Khan narrowly won election to a nine-year term. Unless he’s forced out, we’re stuck with him until 2030.

    Some held the forlorn hope that Khan would prioritize efforts to revive the ICC’s stature and reputation, which by the time he took office was being widely derided as the “International Caucasian Court” and “International Criminal Court for Africa”, on account of the cases it chose – and chose not to – prosecute. In protest at such biases, South Africa at one point temporarily renounced its ICC membership.

    In practice, Khan wasted no time aligning his agenda with that of his sponsors. Almost immediately, he informed the UN Security Council that he would prioritize only those cases referred to him by the Council and essentially ignore the rest.

    The ICC Palestine investigation, such as it was, effectively ceased to exist.

    Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, which the UNSC could not have referred to the ICC for investigation because of Moscow’s power of veto, Khan immediately reversed course on his previous commitments.

    It took him only a week to pop up in Kiev, informing any and every journalist within a 100-mile radius that his investigation was already active. A little over a year later he indicted none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Throughout this period, the ICC’s Palestine investigation remained non-existent.

    There was considerably less spring in his step as the latest crisis in the Middle East erupted on 7 October. It was only at the very end of October that he took the trouble to visit the region.

    Claiming he had been denied entry to the Gaza Strip, he spoke to the assembled media in Cairo, where he delivered a lengthy and impassioned denunciation of the 7 October Palestinian attacks, announced his availability to work with the Israeli authorities to prosecute those responsible for violations of the Rome Statute on that day, yet pointedly refrained from any reference to Israeli war crimes, which his predecessor Bensouda had already in 2019 announced were being committed. Rather, his message to Israel was of a more general nature: that it had clear obligations under international law and would be held accountable for (unspecified) violations.

    Khan further, and disingenuously, claimed that in 2021 he established the “first dedicated team to investigate the Palestine situation”.

    and instead denounced the violence of Israel’s settlers, as if these form an independent vigilante force rather than auxiliary militia implementing state policy.

    The reason Khan tread so lightly also reflects what appears to be the most disturbing element of his agenda.

    Pursuant to the Rome Statute the ICC only prosecutes cases where national authorities have demonstrably failed to ensure accountability. In this context, every examination of Israel’s judicial system with respect to violations of Palestinian rights,

    has concluded that it is essentially a sham, and exists to provide legal justification for such violations and/or exonerate perpetrators.

    Yet Khan emphasized that he stands “ready to engage with relevant national authorities [i.e. Israel] in line with the principle of complementarity at the heart of the Rome Statute”.

    In other words, Khan will prosecute Palestinians, and Israeli violations will be adjudicated by Israel’s court system. Both with predictable results.

    In order to keep this short, I conclude with posting an article
    @hasmikegian
    and I recently wrote for
    @PassBlue
    on why Karim Khan is not fit for purpose. I am also indebted to her for multiple insights and substantial input into this thread. https://www.passblue.com/2023/11/28/is-the-icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-fit-for-purpose

    #CPI

  • Comment les États-Unis ont alimenté la guerre de plusieurs décennies d’Israël contre les Palestiniens
    Posted on décembre 6, 2023 | Rashid Khalidi | Los Angeles Times | Traduction J.Ch. pour l’AURDIP
    https://aurdip.org/comment-les-etats-unis-ont-alimente-la-guerre-de-plusieurs-decennies-disrael

    Les chiffres biaisés de ceux qui sont morts jusqu’ici dans et autour de la Bande de Gaza – environ 1.200 Israéliens et 15.000 Palestiniens – dans la dernière phase d’un conflit plus que centenaire mettent en évidence l’énorme disparité entre ces deux côtés.

    Ces chiffres sont caractéristiques des guerres coloniales, l’un des nombreux aspects souvent occultés par les médias, comme le sont la nature et les origines de cette guerre. Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple lutte entre deux peuples souverains, tels que la France et l’Allemagne. Non, c’est la dernière guerre coloniale de l’époque moderne, menée pour établir l’hégémonie et les droits absolus d’un peuple sur un autre, comme exprimé dans la loi de 2018 « État Nation du Peuple Juif » qui stipule que le droit à l’autodétermination en Palestine « n’est réservé qu’au Peuple juif ».

    En dépit de la connexion incontestable du Judaïsme et du peuple juif à la Terre Sainte, pour les Palestiniens il s’agit d’une lutte anticoloniale. Israël a été créé en tant que projet colonial de peuplement européen – ce qu’aucun de ses premiers dirigeants n’a nié – avec l’aide indispensable de l’impérialisme britannique.

    Malgré le tissu de mythes créés pour dissimuler ces faits, ils sont vitaux pour comprendre que les Palestiniens auraient résisté à n’importe quel groupe qui aurait essayé de leur arracher leur terre, quelle que soit sa religion ou sa nationalité. Que ce groupe se soit trouvé être des Juifs avec un projet national, une profonde connexion à la même terre et une histoire de persécution et de dépossession ailleurs, culminant dans l’Holocauste, donnait à cette guerre son caractère particulièrement désespéré. Mais dans un certain sens, le schéma du conflit qui s’est déroulé au cours du siècle dernier est familier. (...)

  • Privés de visas, les étudiants sahéliens victimes collatérales des tensions entre la France et les régimes putschistes
    https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2023/12/05/prives-de-visas-les-etudiants-saheliens-victimes-collaterales-des-tensions-e

    Privés de visas, les étudiants sahéliens victimes collatérales des tensions entre la France et les régimes putschistes
    Malgré une inscription dans une université française, de nombreux Burkinabés, Maliens et Nigériens ont dû renoncer. Paris se défend de toute une mesure de rétorsion.
    Par Coumba Kane
    « Pour nous, cette année, c’est fini la France », souffle Fodé*. Admis à l’université d’Angers en licence économie et gestion, le jeune Burkinabé n’ira pas étudier dans l’Hexagone. Jusqu’au 30 septembre, date butoir pour rejoindre la faculté angevine, Fodé a espéré partir. Mais, à l’instar de centaines d’autres étudiants du Burkina Faso, mais aussi du Niger et du Mali, également inscrits dans des établissements français, il n’a pas pu déposer sa demande de visa. Depuis cet été, les services consulaires français sont fermés dans ces pays dirigés par des juntes, « pour des raisons de sécurité », justifie-t-on au ministère des affaires étrangères.
    La mesure a été annoncée en septembre en pleine crise diplomatique entre la France et le Niger. Après la prise de pouvoir par les militaires fin juillet, Paris a refusé de reconnaître les nouvelles autorités, qui maintiennent toujours le président Mohamed Bazoum captif. Les tensions ont abouti au départ précipité des troupes françaises et de l’ambassadeur de France.
    Pris au piège de ces dissensions politiques, les étudiants des Etats concernés oscillent entre désespoir et incompréhension. La sélection est si rude que Fodé pensait avoir fait « le plus dur » en réussissant à obtenir une admission via Campus France, l’agence française de promotion à l’étranger de l’enseignement supérieur français et de l’accueil des étudiants étrangers en France. (...)
    Côté français, on confirme le statu quo tout en se défendant d’avoir pris une mesure de rétorsion contre des régimes militaires qui affichent leur hostilité à la France. « Il ne faut pas inverser les responsabilités, ce sont les juntes qui portent atteinte à nos relations. Nous souhaitons préserver les liens avec les forces vives de ces sociétés, notamment les étudiants », réagit-on au Quai d’Orsay. Le ministère affirme ne pas avoir « de visibilité sur la suite », mais assure réévaluer « les conditions sécuritaires dans ces pays, de façon à ajuster au mieux la mesure ». Signe d’une légère accalmie, les services de Campus France ont rouvert le 1er octobre au Mali et au Burkina Faso. Les étudiants de ces pays peuvent à nouveau tenter une admission en France pour la prochaine année universitaire… sans garantie d’obtenir un visa. Reste à savoir si ceux qui avaient déjà été admis, devront reprendre la fastidieuse procédure à zéro. « Nous n’avons pas d’information sur ce point », répond-on à Campus France.
    Au Niger, où la plateforme demeure fermée « pour des raisons de sécurité », l’horizon apparaît plus incertain. Chaque fois qu’il passe devant le consulat français à Niamey, Houzaifa Hamma Issaka a le « cœur qui se serre ». L’étudiant nigérien titulaire d’une licence en droit avait obtenu une inscription à l’université de Nice. Il se préparait à déposer sa demande de visa quand le coup d’Etat s’est produit. « Mes démarches administratives m’ont coûté 150 000 francs CFA (228 euros), soit cinq fois le salaire moyen. Rien ne m’a été remboursé et je me retrouve sans perspectives d’études », se désole l’étudiant qui visait un master en droits humains.
    Comme lui, près d’une centaine de Nigériens admis dans des établissements publics et privés français a perdu une année universitaire. Désemparés, certains ont tenté, en vain, de déposer leur demande de visa au Bénin voisin. « J’ai fait 1 000 km pour tenter ma chance. Mais l’agent a refusé, car je n’ai pas de certificat de résidence. Pourquoi ne pas numériser les demandes ? », s’interroge Ibrahim Maiga. « L’option dématérialisée pour le dépôt d’un visa n’est pas possible ni au Sahel ni ailleurs, répond le ministère des affaires étrangères qui argue d’une procédure immuable. Lors du dépôt du dossier, les données biométriques des demandeurs sont prises, le passeport récupéré afin qu’on y accole une vignette. »Certains étudiants sahéliens, bénéficiaires d’une bourse française, ont néanmoins eu plus de chance. Visés par la mise à l’arrêt de la mobilité internationale fin août suite à la « suspension de l’aide au développement », ils avaient appris quelques jours avant leur départ pour la France l’annulation de leur séjour de recherche. Puis, début octobre, la mesure, dénoncée dans les milieux académiques, avait été levée pour leur permettre de se rendre en France.Koffi, étudiant en géographie à l’université de Ouagadougou, était attendu le 1er septembre à Paris-1 La Sorbonne. Mais deux jours avant, il a reçu un mail lapidaire. « En quelques lignes, on m’a expliqué que mon séjour d’études était annulé. Pourtant j’avais un visa, un logement. Ça a été un choc. » Le 1er novembre, il a finalement pu s’envoler pour Paris avec son visa initial de six mois. « Je vais pouvoir étudier jusqu’à fin janvier. Je suis bien loti car certains boursiers ont perdu beaucoup de temps avec ces restrictions. » En effet, malgré le déblocage de la situation, les durées de visa n’ont pas été allongées.
    Doctorant en géographie et titulaire d’une bourse octroyée par l’ambassade de France, Hamidou Zougouri bénéficiait d’un visa courant de septembre à décembre. Mais il n’a pu se rendre à Paris que début octobre. « J’ai perdu un mois de recherche » explique-t-il par téléphone, à peine rentré de France. « J’ai tout de même travaillé au mieux grâce à l’investissement de mon directeur de thèse », se réjouit l’étudiant rattaché au CNRS. « Mais il aurait fallu nous informer de cette décision des semaines à l’avance pour qu’on s’organise. On a eu l’impression que la France nous abandonnait en plein vol. »

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#france#niger#mali#burkina#sahel#etudiant#visas#politiquemigratoire#crise

  • Ouganda : Washington va restreindre les visas des responsables qui appliquent une loi anti-LGBT+
    https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2023/12/05/ouganda-washington-va-restreindre-les-visas-des-responsables-qui-appliquent-

    Ouganda : Washington va restreindre les visas des responsables qui appliquent une loi anti-LGBT+
    La diplomatie américaine cible les dirigeants qui répriment également les défenseurs de l’environnement, des droits humains et les journalistes.
    Le Monde avec AFP
    Les Etats-Unis ont annoncé, lundi 4 décembre, qu’ils refuseront d’accorder des visas aux responsables ougandais qui appliqueraient une loi anti-homosexualité controversée, promulguée dans le pays d’Afrique de l’Est en mai et qui comprend des sanctions allant jusqu’à la peine de mort. Le secrétaire d’Etat américain Antony Blinken a déclaré que la mesure concernerait les responsables ougandais, qu’ils soient encore en activité ou non, et les membres de leur famille, s’il s’avère qu’ils ont joué un rôle dans la « répression de membres de populations marginalisées ou vulnérables ». « Ces groupes comprennent entre autres les défenseurs de l’environnement, les défenseurs des droits humains, les journalistes, les personnes LGBTQI + et les responsables d’organisations civiles, détaille M. Blinken dans un communiqué. Une fois de plus, j’encourage vivement le gouvernement ougandais à faire des efforts pour défendre la démocratie et pour respecter et protéger les droits humains, afin que nous puissions maintenir le partenariat qui existe depuis des décennies entre nos deux pays et qui a profité aux Américains comme aux Ougandais. »Dès l’adoption de la loi, le président américain Joe Biden avait appelé à son abrogation immédiate et menacé de réduire les aides et investissements américains en Ouganda. Le texte prévoit de lourdes sanctions allant jusqu’à la prison à perpétuité, voire la peine de mort, pour les personnes ayant des relations homosexuelles et faisant la « promotion » de l’homosexualité. Incluse dans la législation ougandaise, la peine capitale n’est cependant plus appliquée depuis des années.Il y a dix ans, l’Ouganda avait annulé une autre loi qui imposait la perpétuité pour des personnes ayant eu des relations homosexuelles, après que des donateurs internationaux, dont les Etats-Unis, eurent réduit leur aide financière.
    Cette nouvelle décision en matière de visas, qui ne cite publiquement aucun nom, est une extension des restrictions imposées à l’Ouganda en raison d’irrégularités présumées lors de la présidentielle de 2021. Yoweri Museveni, président depuis 1986, avait obtenu un nouveau mandat lors de ce scrutin. Parallèlement, M. Blinken a également annoncé que les Etats-Unis refuseront de délivrer des visas à toute personne ayant compromis le processus électoral au Zimbabwe en août. Ce scrutin contesté a permis la reconduction du président Emmerson Mnangagwa, dont le parti dirige le pays depuis plus de quarante ans.

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#ouganda#etatsunis#visas#LGBT#sante#droit#vulnerabilite

  • Scholars Who Study the Middle East Are Afraid to Speak Out
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-who-study-the-middle-east-are-afraid-to-speak-out

    American college campuses have been at the center of charged political disputes in the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and the subsequent attacks by Israel on Gaza. These heated debates have focused on the pressures on university presidents to take a stand, the behavior of student groups, allegations of antisemitism, and the censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. But less attention has been paid to one group directly affected by the controversies: the scholars who work on and teach about the Middle East, who every day concentrate professionally on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

    #états-unis #démocratie #nos_valeurs #censure #liberté_d’expression #criminel

  • Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone | MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging

    This is the first time the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks have been calculated.

    (selon une #étude_récente qui pour une fois n’a pas l’air d’une #étude_à_la_con)

  • Inside France’s courtship of Binance
    https://www.ft.com/content/47fe6542-d000-4051-86d9-feb0055697da

    “Honored to have dinner with (a few hundred people and) President Macron. @ Choose France”, CZ tweeted in July 2022 © @cz_binance on X

    Akila Quinio

    Ten years ago, France had an innovation problem. Despite training top engineers and financiers, the country struggled to build successful homegrown start-ups and attract venture capital. Its boldest scientists were flocking to Silicon Valley.

    Then came Emmanuel Macron. Vowing to make France a “start-up nation” the former financier set out to shake things up. He brought in tech visas, boosted public grants and relaxed investment rules to foster entrepreneurship.

    Their zeal to attract tech companies to invest in Paris has attracted US giants like Google and Netflix, as well as helping establish a stable of domestic “unicorns”. But in seeking to cure its innovation problem Macron’s government has taken risks. The open-door policy might yet become an embarrassment around crypto in particular, as its courting of Binance has shown.

    It all started when Changpeng “CZ” Zhao met Macron at the Elysée palace in November 2021. That same month, Binance said it would invest €100mn into France’s burgeoning crypto scene — a pledge dubbed “objective moon” by its founder. The courtship culminated with France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers, the financial watchdog, granting the exchange regulatory approval last May — a move that contrasted sharply with other national regulatory stances.

    Cue the honeymoon phase. In October last year, CZ headlined France Fintech’s flagship conference in the business district of La Défense. The industry’s best-known founders, including Cyril Chiche of payment app Lydia, lined up to shake hands and be photographed next to him.

    A person familiar with the discussions told the FT that the French government granted Binance more than a hundred tech visas to help it grow its operations on French soil. On stage, CZ joked that he was spending so much time in France that he had started to buy his socks in Paris. (I later asked if he also paid taxes there, to which he said he had no awareness of his own fiscal residency.)

    French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire last year told BFM Business that he was “proud” of Binance’s French registration. Attracting foreign players including Binance was key to France’s bid to become a “European hub of the crypto assets ecosystem”, he said.

    This initial courting was taking place when crypto was still hot. The industry has since suffered a few reputational hits. Sam Bankman-Fried fell from grace and was convicted of fraud and money laundering in the US. Regulators were also scrutinising Binance, leading to its guilty plea last month to criminal charges related to money laundering and breaching international financial sanctions. In France, authorities are investigating the exchange for having allegedly advertised and promoted its services before it was allowed to operate there.

    One may expect recent events to have rocked the nascent relationship. But the French government appears to have remained under Binance’s charm.

    Following the collapse of FTX, French legislators beefed up the requirements for newcomers wishing to set shop in the country. Getting an Autorité des Marchés Financiers registration will from January take into account new criteria including having a resilient and secure IT system and a process to manage conflicts of interest. But such requirements will not apply to companies already registered with the AMF, including Binance.

    The government also resisted pressure to bring forward to October 2023 the deadline by which registered crypto companies are forced to apply for a regulatory licence, claiming it might make investors “flee” the country.

    Under the revised legislation and European law, Binance’s French regulatory status means it is set to benefit from an 18-month grace period before it has to apply for a licence as mandated by upcoming European law, meaning it is able to keep operating on a local registration until July 2026.

    For companies that are already registered, “the least I can say is that the government was not in favour of making the regulatory framework tougher,” said Hervé Maurey, a senator who was involved in the negotiations. “What we are putting in place will allow us to control the arrival of new players but not so much those who are already here.”

    Last month I spoke with a member of Macron’s parliamentary majority who reiterated that France had been right to embrace the exchange. Binance’s presence was a testament to the country’s changed attitude towards innovation, he said. I suggested it may also be a testament to its changed attitude towards alleged financial crime. You never know who might become “the next Google”, he replied.

    Less than three weeks later, CZ resigned as Binance CEO and pleaded guilty to a US criminal charge related to money laundering. He could face up to 18 months of imprisonment.

    The parliamentarian also made a fair point: French regulators were among the first to create a regulatory framework for digital asset providers, which formed a template for Europe’s upcoming Mica regulation. Under a two-tier system, Binance has only been granted a registration rather than a full-fledged licence that offers consumer protection. Only the exchange’s French operation is allowed to operate in the country and certain activities such as futures trading are banned in France.

    But a closer look at Binance’s activities suggests the exchange may have pushed the limits of its strict regulatory mandate.

    Behind a seemingly benevolent charity programme, Binance has used aggressive tactics to solicit people to use its services in some of France’s most deprived areas. Far from its glitzy office in Place de la Bourse, the company has targeted banlieues such as Aulnay-sous-Bois and Montreuil.

    Its promise was to train students from all walks of life with the technical skills required to find employment in blockchain-related industries, including as engineers. The goal was to reach 10,000 students by the end of this year.

    Last October, I attended one such “awareness” course in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris known for its poverty and crime rate. It lasted half a day and consisted of a slideshow on blockchain technology followed by a short practical exercise with Solidity, a blockchain programming language.

    In class, students received Binance goody bags with branded hats, promotional leaflets, pens and notebooks. They were asked to download MetaMask wallets, software that allows access to decentralised applications and storage of digital assets including unregulated financial instruments.
    Binance said its charity initiative would “provide training for 10,000 people in Web3 application, awareness and software development.”

    French regulation does not allow registered crypto companies such as Binance to make unsolicited approaches to prospective customers for marketing purposes. Doing so is a criminal offence which can result in fines of up to €7,500 for individuals and €37,500 for companies, according to Henry des Horts, a financial regulation lawyer at Addleshaw Goddard.

    Binance France said: “We recognise that digital education and skills development can be out of reach for many, resulting in a blockchain industry that lacks diversity and talent. The Binance Scholar Program helps to change that, covering the costs of tuition and course fees at some of the world’s leading universities, colleges and vocational training providers.”

    Bryan Houblon, a then-24-year-old attendee from Bondy, was retraining as web developer after his philosophy degree failed to secure him a job. “They told us that a junior blockchain developer could earn 100K per year so obviously we all had starry eyes — it’s attractive,” he said.

    For Terry Jenly, a student from Aulnay-sous-Bois who was part of the same cohort and was 20 years old at the time, the gifts were a sign of CZ’s charitable streak. “The Binance T-shirt I got is of amazing quality so it’s always a nice touch,” said Jenly. “Maybe CZ had a childhood like us in the banlieues and that’s why he wants to share with the less fortunate.”

    In class, Houblon was told that he needed a Binance account in order to receive his NFT diploma after the half-day course — a proof of ownership and security, said his teachers. He started the registration process during the lesson but did not complete it.

    “I started to create the Binance account because they asked me to and now they are harassing me with follow-up emails,” said Houblon, who received 17 promotional emails, seen by the FT, in the month that followed his lesson. More than a year later, Houblon is still receiving emails from the exchange, including some urging him to redeem cryptocurrency vouchers on the platform.
    More than a year later, Houblon is still receiving advertisements from Binance urging him to redeem crypto vouchers on the app

    Neither student had signed up to take the class voluntarily. They were made to participate as part of a retraining course subsidised by the government and hosted by coding school Simplon.

    “This looks more like a marketing operation than anything else,” said French MEP Aurore Lalucq who last June opposed France’s registration of Binance. To her, the initiative looked like an attempt by the platform to find new users in vulnerable areas disguised as an educational project.

    “Many companies set up foundations to work on projects which are normally unrelated to their commercial interests like fighting discrimination, or advocating for women . . . but I struggle to see the educational value in this”.

    Out of the 10,000 people Binance has targeted to train by the end of 2023, less than a hundred will have received coding lessons. The rest are set to receive “awareness courses”.

    One person familiar with the outreach programme who asked not to be named said Binance’s main “KPI” (key performance indicator) for the charity initiative was “user acquisition”.

    Asked about his due diligence, Simplon founder Frédéric Bardeau said he felt safe partnering with Binance because the trading shop had been vetted by both France’s government and its market regulator.

    When I rang him about publishing this piece, Bardeau said he has since demanded Binance would stop issuing students with their attendance certificates by NFT that could only be obtained on Binance digital wallets.

    “Our mission was to make people understand and like blockchain and all its use cases beyond crypto,” he said. “Not mixing genres and hard-selling.” The next day, promotional content about the Binance partnership had disappeared from Simplon’s online homepage.

    France’s ministry of finance said: “The French government’s position remains very clear: regulation must apply with strength to Binance just like it must apply to all other financial entities while supervisors; and law enforcement if need, are charged with the enforcement of this regulation”.

    The French ministry of labour, employment and economic inclusion has been asked for comment. The AMF declined to comment.

    Thierry Philipponnat, who sat on the board of the AMF at the time of Binance’s registration, said Binance Charity’s education initiative could be the subject of legal wrangling in the future.

    “One thing is certain: the [AMF crypto registration regime] does not allow direct solicitation of customers,” he said. “I imagine that the practices [described] could give rise to a fine debate between lawyers as to whether or not they should be considered as marketing.”

    #Cryptomonnaies #Arnaque #Binance #Chômeurs #Etat_complice

  • (Vidéo) “Les #étudiants ont une revanche à prendre sur Macron” – Entretien avec Erell
    https://www.frustrationmagazine.fr/erell-etudiants

    Erell est étudiante en sociologie et économie, militante au Poing Levé et à Révolution Permanente, elle est une des figures du mouvement étudiant. Dans le cadre de l’invitation de l’équipe de Frustration Magazine à l’université d’Eté de Révolution Permanente, nous avons parlé avec elle du Poing Levé, des actions que le mouvement mène, de pourquoi […]

    #Entretiens #Vidéos

  • « Ma médaille d’argent du CNRS m’inspire aujourd’hui du dégoût »
    https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2023/12/04/ma-medaille-d-argent-du-cnrs-m-inspire-aujourd-hui-du-degout_6203861_1650684

    Dans leurs pétitions, les chercheurs ne demandent pas d’augmentation de salaire, ils ne demandent pas plus de moyens, non, ils demandent simplement qu’on les laisse faire leur travail sereinement, et de disposer efficacement de leurs crédits très souvent gérés par le CNRS, même s’ils proviennent d’autres sources !

    Depuis cet été, un trio de logiciels, acheté à une entreprise privée, a été mis en place pour gérer de A (l’ordre de mission) à Z (la remise des états de frais) les déplacements financés par le CNRS. Le résultat est un calvaire indescriptible pour les missionnaires et les gestionnaires. Les missionnaires doivent faire le travail des gestionnaires (générer la liste des frais dans le système et rentrer tous les justificatifs). La difficulté est telle que nombre d’entre eux renoncent à partir en mission ou à se faire rembourser une mission faite. Les gestionnaires, loin d’avoir des tâches en moins, sont débordés par une multitude de validations et d’opérations bloquées, dont le débogage prend un temps fou. Le stress est généralisé.

    Viscosité du système
    Cette catastrophe administrative n’est qu’une (très grosse) goutte d’eau qui fait déborder le vase des entraves au travail de recherche. La gestion au CNRS est envahie par un juridisme qui rend tout acte de plus en plus pesant chaque année. La moindre action hors du laboratoire ou avec des tierces personnes déclenche une avalanche de signatures de convention et d’arguties juridiques, par exemple sur la propriété intellectuelle. La viscosité du système est telle que les chercheurs en viennent à renoncer à des contrats ou que des projets n’aboutissent pas pour des raisons de délai d’engagement de crédits, par exemple. Ingénieurs et techniciens aussi sont touchés par l’inflation administrative, et sont plus souvent à remplir des formulaires qu’à faire le travail scientifique pour lequel ils ont été embauchés.

    #CNRS #bureaucratisation

    • voilà ce que déclarait en 2008 Pécresse, ministre de l’#ESR

      La deuxième orientation, c’est une simplification résolue des contraintes de gestion des unités mixtes afin de rendre du temps de recherche aux chercheurs, car à l’heure actuelle, leur complexité (circuits administratifs et financiers, gestion des personnels, procédures d’évaluation, valorisation des résultats des travaux de recherche...) engendre une surcharge de travail pour les personnels et responsables de laboratoires. Il est souhaitable de limiter à deux les tutelles scientifiques (l’une nationale, l’autre locale) qui s’exercent sur les unités mixtes de recherche, sachant qu’aujourd’hui, près de 50 % des 1 300 UMR sont soumises à plus de deux tutelles, et 20 % en ont plus de quatre. La généralisation d’un mandat de gestion unique pour l’université ou l’organisme qui héberge l’unité simplifiera les circuits de financement et permettra un octroi plus rationnel des moyens. Le rapport recommande également d’aligner les procédures d’achat et toutes les règles financières, fiscales et comptables des laboratoires sur le régime le plus simple et le plus efficace. En matière d’achats publics, un alignement sur les règles du CNRS qui prévoient une délégation de la signature aux directeurs d’unité est préconisé. Enfin, pour alléger le travail des personnels et éviter des doubles saisies, nous devrons mettre en cohérence les systèmes d’information et développer leur interopérabilité.

      https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/171598-interview-de-mme-valerie-pecresse-ministre-de-lenseignement-supe
      Quant à Sarkozy, il comparait le CNRS à l’Académie des Sciences de l’Union soviétique. L’action pionnière de Sarkozy, Pécresse jusqu’à Macron et ses sbires ont abouti exactement à ça. Bravo à toutes et tous !

    • Un de ces fameux #logiciels pour gérer les #missions (notamment), s’appelle #Notilus (https://academia.hypotheses.org/54107), CHAUCHEMARDESQUE !!!

      Les autres : #Goelett et #Etamine

      Pour info, ce n’est que grâce à l’action conjointe de toustes les directeurices de labo qu’il a été possible de bloquer les frais de gestion de dossier de mission établi (2 EUR par mission, de l’#argent_public donc !) qui étaient facturés par l’entreprise qui a gagné le #marché_public pour CHAQUE mission.

      Pour info, pour réserver des hôtels et des transports il faut passer par l’entreprise qui a gagné le marché public. Pour nous, il s’agit en ce moment de #FCM_Travel... A noter que c’est systématiquement BEAUCOUP plus cher de passer par cette #agence_de_voyage que si on réserverait par nos propres soins.
      Une collègue m’a dit avoir réservé une chambre d’hôtel (pourrie) en France pour le prix de 200 EUR en passant par FCM Travel alors que la réservation via des plateformes proposait, pour la même nuit, quelque chose comme 120 EUR... juste pour vous donner une petite idée...

      Autre chose intéressante, j’ai dû acheter un billet Grenoble-Marseille. J’ai cherché les options sur FCM travel, et la plateforme ne m’offrait aucune solution... j’ai appelé l’opérateur qui m’a dit qu’il fallait que je réserve 2 secteurs séparément : Grenoble-Valence et puis Valence-Marseille (pratique !!!). C’était quelque jours avant qu’on ait l’info des 2 EUR de frais de gestion, et je me dis que ce n’est probablement pas pour rien... en divisant le voyage en 2 secteurs, probablement quelqu’un empoche 2x2EUR... (donc 8 EUR en tout pour l’aller-retour).

      #université #bureaucratie #recherche #ESR #France #dégoût #bureaucratisation #Pierre_Rochette #Pécresse #Valérie_Pécresse

    • Le SNCS-FSU demande l’abandon du système Etamine, Notilus et Goelett

      Communiqué du SNCS-FSU du 23 novembre 2023

      Les personnels des laboratoires et des délégations du CNRS expérimentent le dysfonctionnement et la complexité des outils numériques Etamine, Notilus et Goelett depuis plus de quatre mois. Le SNCS-FSU dénonçait dès le 14 septembre 2023 le calvaire que ce trio de logiciels fait subir à tous les personnels du CNRS. Depuis, la direction du CNRS a indiqué que les principaux dysfonctionnements auraient été résolus. Cependant, tous les personnels constatent que des dysfonctionnements persistent. Mais le plus inquiétant est certainement la complexité de l’ensemble Etamine, Notilus et Goelett. Même après des mois de familiarisation avec ces outils à travers un nombre significatif de missions, il apparaît que la complexité globale de ce système est trop importante et que son utilisation ne sera jamais assez simple pour les agents souhaitant partir en mission. Le SNCS-FSU considère que c’est la conception même du système qui est à revoir.

      Le SNCS-FSU demande que le système Etamine, Notilus et Goelett soit abandonné et remplacé par un autre système plus simple, qui fonctionne et qui donne satisfaction. Ce système engendre aujourd’hui une dégradation des conditions de travail de tous les personnels des laboratoires et des délégations du CNRS, et il est évident que cela continuera.

      Pour les agent·e·s souhaitant partir en mission, le constat est indiscutable : l’utilisation de ces logiciels est et restera une perte de temps significative par rapport à la situation antérieure, même dans les rares cas où ces missionnaires se seront parfaitement familiarisé·e·s avec ces outils. D’autant plus qu’il est évident que très peu d’agent·e·s pourront se familiariser avec ce système, même en partant souvent en mission, tant il est complexe et rigide.

      Si le travail des agent·e·s des services de gestion pourrait, à terme, bénéficier de la dématérialisation et du report de certaines tâches vers les missionnaires, elles et ils seront beaucoup plus sollicité·e·s dans l’accompagnement de ces missionnaires. Les agents des services de gestion devront, en effet, répondre à leurs innombrables questions, incompréhensions, agacements, exaspérations, frustrations, désespoirs… L’impossibilité pour les agent·e·s des services de gestion de répondre de façon satisfaisante aux attentes de celles et ceux partant en mission est une cause importante de la dégradation des conditions de travail.

      Le SNCS-FSU estime que le système Etamine, Notilus et Goelett constitue un véritable recul. Le SNCS-FSU considère que la meilleure solution est de l’abandonner et de le remplacer par un système qui simplifie les démarches pour tous les personnels et qui libère du temps pour la recherche.

      Le SNCS-FSU appelle à signer et à faire signer massivement la pétition « CNRS : nouveau système de gestion des missions, on n’en peut plus ! » pour sortir de ce système insupportable et mettre fin à ce calvaire.

      Le SNCS-FSU apporte tout son soutien à tou·te·s les agent·e·s confronté·e·s à ces difficultés et à ce système absurde.

      https://academia.hypotheses.org/54107

    • C’est toujours intéressant d’appréhender le réseau qu’il y a derrière.

      Depuis cet été, un trio de logiciels, acheté à une entreprise privée, a été mis en place pour gérer de A (l’ordre de mission) à Z (la remise des états de frais) les déplacements financés par le CNRS.

      L’entreprise en question fcmtravel avait signé en 2021 pour 3 ans… ça a été reconduit ?
      Le groupement FCM, RYDOO et NOTILUS remporte l’appel d’offres lancé par le CNRS et l’AMUE.
      https://www.fcmtravel.com/fr-fr/resources/news-hub/le-groupement-fcm-rydoo-et-notilus-remporte-lappel-doffres-lance-par-le-c

      La mise en place d’une nouvelle plateforme devait permettre la dématérialisation de bout en bout des processus de la demande de voyage, représentant 97 millions d’euros de dépenses annuelles. Pour accompagner leurs 200 000 utilisateurs potentiels, le CNRS et l’AMUE ont donc fait le choix d’une nouvelle solution ambitieuse avec le groupement Rydoo (portail de réservation et base hôtelière), FCM (agence de voyages d’affaires) et Notilus (solution de gestion des ordres de missions et états de frais).

      Une de leur réalisation commune est l’UGAP, centrale d’achat public. (L’Union des groupements d’achats publics est une centrale d’achat publique française, placée sous la double tutelle du ministre chargé du Budget et du ministre chargé de l’Éducation nationale.)

      Notilus, une des pièces du puzzle à reconstituer …
      Notilus Filiale du Groupe DIMO Software. DIMO est issu de Cerg Finance qui en 1998 rachète XRT https://www.lesechos.fr/1998/09/cerg-finance-acquiert-le-numero-un-americain-des-logiciels-de-cash-manageme #cash-management

  • L’augmentation du #chiffre_d’affaires issu des ventes d’#armes du Top 100 du #SIPRI impactée par des défis de production et des carnets de commandes remplis

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des #ventes_d’armes et de services à caractère militaire par les 100 plus grandes entreprises d’#armement s’élève à 597 milliards de dollars en 2022, soit 3,5 % de moins qu’en 2021 en termes réels, alors même que la demande a fortement augmenté. C’est ce que révèlent les nouvelles données publiées aujourd’hui par le Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

    Cette diminution s’explique principalement par la baisse du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des plus grandes entreprises américaines. Le chiffre d’affaires a augmenté de manière significative en Asie, Océanie et au Moyen-Orient. Les commandes en cours et la multiplication de nouveaux contrats laissent présager que le chiffre d’affaires mondial issu des ventes d’armes pourrait augmenter de manière significative au cours des prochaines années.

    La demande en armement augmente mais la #production reste à la traîne

    L’invasion à grande échelle de l’Ukraine par la Russie et les tensions géopolitiques dans le monde ont provoqué une forte augmentation de la demande d’armes et d’équipements militaires en 2022. Cependant, malgré de nouvelles commandes, de nombreuses entreprises d’armement américaines et européennes n’ont pas pu augmenter de manière significative leur capacité de production en raison de difficultés de recrutement, de flambée des coûts et de perturbations dans les chaînes d’approvisionnement exacerbées par la #guerre_en_Ukraine. En outre, les pays ont passé de nouvelles commandes en fin d’année et en raison du décalage entre les commandes et la production, l’augmentation de la demande ne s’est pas reflétée dans le chiffre d’affaires de ces entreprises en 2022.

    « De nombreuses entreprises d’armement ont été confrontées à des obstacles pour adapter leur production en vue d’une guerre de haute intensité », souligne Dr Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, directrice du programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Toutefois, de nouveaux contrats ont été signés notamment pour des #munitions, ce qui devrait se traduire par une hausse du chiffre d’affaires en 2023 et au-delà. » Contrairement aux plus grands fournisseurs américains et européens, les entreprises d’Asie, d’Océanie et du Moyen-Orient ont vu leur chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes augmenter de manière significative en 2022, démontrant ainsi leur capacité à répondre à une demande accrue dans des délais plus courts. Cela est particulièrement vrai dans les pays où les entreprises disposent de capacités de fabrication réactives et compétitives, comme #Israël et la #Corée_du_Sud, et dans ceux où les entreprises ont tendance à s’appuyer sur des chaînes d’approvisionnement courtes.

    Aux États-Unis, le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes chute en raison de problèmes de production

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des 42 entreprises américaines du Top 100 a chuté de 7,9 % pour atteindre 302 milliards de dollars en 2022. Il représente 51 % du chiffre d’affaires total issu des ventes d’armes du Top 100. Sur les 42 entreprises américaines, 32 ont enregistré une baisse de leur chiffre d’affaires sur un an, citant le plus souvent des problèmes persistants dans la chaîne d’approvisionnement et des pénuries de main-d’œuvre résultant de la pandémie de Covid-19.

    « On constate un afflux de nouvelles commandes liées à la guerre en Ukraine et certaines grandes entreprises américaines, dont #Lockheed_Martin et #Raytheon_Technologies, ont reçu de nouvelles commandes en conséquence », précise Dr Nan Tian, chercheur principal au SIPRI. « Cependant, en raison des carnets de commandes déjà existants de ces entreprises et des difficultés à augmenter leur capacité de production, les revenus générés par ces nouvelles commandes ne se refléteront dans les comptes de l’entreprise probablement que d’ici deux à trois ans. »

    L’#Asie surpasse l’#Europe tirée par un phénomène de #modernisation_militaire

    Le chiffre d’affaire issu des ventes d’armes des 22 entreprises d’Asie et d’Océanie répertoriées dans le classement a augmenté de 3,1 % pour atteindre 134 milliards de dollars en 2022. Il s’agit de la deuxième année consécutive où le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des entreprises du Top 100 situées en Asie et en Océanie est supérieur à celui des entreprises situées en Europe.

    « La demande intérieure et l’appui sur des fournisseurs locaux ont protégé les entreprises d’armement asiatiques des perturbations dans la chaîne d’approvisionnement en 2022 », explique Xiao Liang, chercheur au programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Les entreprises en #Chine, en #Inde, au #Japon et à Taïwan ont toutes bénéficié d’investissements gouvernementaux soutenus dans le cadre des programmes de modernisation militaire. »

    Le #chiffre_d’affaires combiné des quatre entreprises sud-coréennes du Top 100 a chuté de 0,9 %, principalement en raison d’une baisse de 8,5 % enregistrée par le plus grand producteur d’armes du pays, #Hanwha_Aerospace. Deux entreprises sud-coréennes ont enregistré une augmentation de leur chiffre d’affaires, notamment #LIG_Nex1. Les entreprises sud-coréennes devraient connaître un accroissement de leur chiffre d’affaires dans les années à venir en raison d’une augmentation des commandes enregistrées après la signature d’importants contrats d’armement avec la Pologne et les Émirats arabes unis.

    Augmentation modeste du chiffre d’affaires en Europe alors que la demande liée à l’Ukraine commence à affluer

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des 26 entreprises du Top 100 basées en Europe a augmenté de 0,9 % pour atteindre 121 milliards de dollars en 2022.

    « La guerre en Ukraine a entraîné une demande de matériel adapté à une guerre d’usure, comme les munitions et les véhicules blindés. De nombreux producteurs européens ont vu leur chiffre d’affaires augmenter », souligne Lorenzo Scarazzato, chercheur au programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Il s’agit notamment d’entreprises basées en #Allemagne, en #Norvège et en #Pologne. Par exemple, la société polonaise #PGZ a augmenté son chiffre d’affaires de 14 %, bénéficiant du programme accéléré de modernisation militaire que le pays poursuit. »

    Les sociétés transeuropéennes #Airbus et #KNDS comptent parmi les principales sources d’augmentation du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes en Europe, en grande partie grâce aux livraisons effectuées sur des commandes de longue date.

    Les entreprises turques mènent une augmentation significative du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes au Moyen-Orient

    Le Moyen-Orient a connu la plus forte augmentation en pourcentage du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes de toutes les régions en 2022. Les sept entreprises basées au Moyen-Orient figurant dans le Top 100 ont enregistré une augmentation substantielle. Leur chiffre d’affaires combiné de 17,9 milliards de dollars représente une augmentation de 11 % sur un an. Le chiffre d’affaires combiné des quatre entreprises turques a atteint 5,5 milliards de dollars, soit 22 % de plus qu’en 2021. Le chiffre d’affaires combiné des trois entreprises israéliennes du Top 100 a atteint 12,4 milliards de dollars en 2022, soit une augmentation de 6,5 % par rapport à 2021.

    « Les entreprises du Moyen-Orient spécialisées dans des produits moins sophistiqués sur le plan technologique ont pu augmenter leur production plus rapidement afin de répondre à l’augmentation de la demande », précise Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, chercheur principal au SIPRI. « L’exemple le plus frappant est celui de #Baykar, en Turquie, producteur du #drone #Bayraktar_TB-2. Baykar est entré dans le Top 100 pour la première fois en raison de l’augmentation de son chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes de 94 %, soit le taux d’augmentation le plus rapide de toutes les entreprises du classement. »

    Autres développements notables

    - En 2022, la Chine représente la deuxième plus grande part du chiffre d’affaires par pays du Top 100, soit 18 %. Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes combiné des huit entreprises d’armement chinoises du Top 100 a augmenté de 2,7 % pour atteindre 108 milliards de dollars.
    - Le chiffre d’affaires issus des ventes d’armes des sept entreprises britanniques dans le Top 100 ont augmenté de 2,6 % pour atteindre 41,8 milliards de dollars, soit 7,0 % du total.
    - En raison du manque de données, seules deux entreprises russes ont été incluses dans le Top 100 pour 2022. Leur chiffre d’affaires combiné a chuté de 12 %, à 20,8 milliards de dollars. La transparence des entreprises russes continue de régresser. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une holding, sans capacité de production directe, #Rostec est incluse dans le Top 100 de 2022 en tant que mandataire des entreprises qu’elle contrôle.
    - La seule entreprise ukrainienne figurant dans le Top 100, #UkrOboronProm, a vu son chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes chuter de 10 % en termes réels, à 1,3 milliard de dollars. Bien que son chiffre d’affaires ait augmenté en termes nominaux, cela a été compensé par la forte inflation du pays.

    À l’attention des rédacteurs

    À propos de la base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement

    La base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement a été créée en 1989. À cette époque, elle excluait les données des entreprises installées en Chine, en Union soviétique et en Europe de l’Est. La version actuelle contient des données pour 2002-2022, y compris des données sur les entreprises russes. Les entreprises chinoises sont incluses à partir de 2015.
    Le « chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes » fait référence au chiffre d’affaires généré par la vente de biens et de services à caractère militaire à des clients militaires nationaux et étrangers. Sauf indication contraire, tous les changements sont exprimés en termes réels et tous les chiffres sont donnés en dollars américains constants de 2022. Les comparaisons entre 2021 et 2022 sont basées sur la liste des entreprises du classement 2022 (c’est-à-dire que la comparaison annuelle s’effectue entre le même ensemble d’entreprises). Les comparaisons à plus long terme sont basées sur des ensembles d’entreprises listées au cours de l’année respective (c’est-à-dire que la comparaison porte sur des listes différentes d’entreprises).

    La base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement, qui présente un ensemble de données plus détaillées pour les années 2002 à 2022, est disponible sur le site Web du SIPRI : https://www.sipri.org/databases/armsindustry

    https://www.obsarm.info/spip.php?article631

    #industrie_de_l'armement #rapport #chiffres #statistiques #USA #Etats-Unis #business #Turquie

    voir aussi :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/1029978

  • L’épave de l’#Osprey américain tombé en mer au large du Japon reste introuvable
    https://lemarin.ouest-france.fr/defense/lepave-de-losprey-americain-tombe-en-mer-au-large-du-japon-rest

    La fiabilité de l’Osprey, doté de rotors basculants lui permettant de décoller et atterrir verticalement comme un hélicoptère et de voler comme un avion, fait débat depuis longtemps en raison de nombreux accidents mortels. Fin août, trois marines américains ont été tués dans l’accident d’un Osprey dans le nord de l’Australie. En 2022, quatre autres ont péri en Norvège lorsque leur Osprey s’est écrasé lors d’exercices de l’Otan. Un engin américain du même type s’est également abîmé en mer en 2017, faisant trois morts. Et en avril 2000, 19 marines ont été tués lorsqu’un Osprey s’est écrasé en Arizona, au sud-ouest des États-Unis.

    […]

    Le Japon a suspendu les vols de ses propres Osprey depuis l’accident de mercredi et a demandé à l’armée américaine de faire pareil sur le territoire nippon, par mesure de précaution. Les États-Unis n’ont pas obtempéré jusqu’à présent. Les Osprey opèrent toujours au Japon , a déclaré jeudi 30 novembre la porte-parole adjointe du Pentagone Sabrina Singh lors d’une conférence de presse à Washington. Si l’enquête conclut que des mesures supplémentaires doivent être prises, nous le ferons, mais pour l’instant, l’enquête est en cours sur ce qui s’est passé , a-t-elle ajouté. Le ministre japonais de la Défense, Minoru Kihara, s’est dit vendredi 1er décembre préoccupé par la poursuite des vols d’Osprey malgré l’absence d’explications suffisantes en matière de sécurité .

    #états-unis