Never Again? Europe’s False Human Rights Promise | The Diplomat
▻https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/never-again-europes-false-human-rights-promise
In 2015, the European Union experienced one of the largest migratory flows in history, receiving over 1 million asylum applications. Branded as a crisis, this substantial flow of people in pursuit of safety and security continues to this day. In fact, over 3 million people have entered the EU since.
While headlines often ascribe the war in Syria as the primary catalyst for this mass migration, Syrians comprise only a fraction of the total, reaching 16 percent in 2017. Other primary countries of origin for migrants were Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. The victims of Syria’s ongoing, deadly conflict certainly deserve media spotlight, but a parochial focus tends to dilute and obfuscate the larger debate on human rights in Europe. It shadows the fates of asylum seekers from countries other than Syria. The EU has exploited media silence around countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to ignore its obligations to those countries under international refugee law, the very humanitarian legal regime that many of its member states helped to craft after World War II.
The EU-Afghanistan 2016 “Joint Way Forward” agreement exemplifies the EU’s retreat from its humanitarian ethos. At a donor conference in Brussels, EU member states coerced Afghanistan officials into accepting 80,000 returning EU asylum applicants in exchange for billions of dollars in reconstruction aid. The deal operates on the assumption that Afghanistan is moving toward stabilization, yet Afghanistan’s current security situation remains mired in conflict. Since 2016, when the Joint Way Forward was drafted, over 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed, and Transparency International estimates Afghanistan’s government to be one of the top 10 most corrupt in the world.