#zone-

Suzee in the city
Art on the streets of Cairo
▻https://suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com

‪À l’épreuve des murs. Sécurisation et pratiques politiques dans le centre-ville du Caire postrévolutionnaire (2014-2015)‪

La révolution égyptienne de 2011 s’est caractérisée par une lutte pour l’appropriation de l’espace public. Elle a été analysée comme une démocratie en actes où les révolutionnaires se sont réappropriés par leurs pratiques et leurs stratégies un espace trop longtemps sécurisé par le gouvernement de Moubarak. Cet article vise à étudier en contre-point les stratégies territoriales de l’État pour le contrôle des espaces publics depuis 2011 et en particulier depuis 2013 avec le renforcement de la répression envers les Frères musulmans et l’arrivée au pouvoir des militaires. Ces stratégies sont mises en évidence dans le cas du centre-ville, épicentre de la révolution mais aussi de la représentation et de l’exercice du pouvoir politique. Elles se caractérisent par des pratiques de cantonnement des manifestations et par l’instauration de barrières et de checkpoints dans le centre-ville du Caire, constituant un véritable dispositif territorialisé et planifié de contrôle des rassemblements publics et des revendications politiques. Cet article vise donc également à analyser les conséquences de ce contrôle sur les pratiques politiques des opposants au régime à l’échelle locale du centre-ville du Caire à travers la restitution d’observations et d’entretiens menés entre 2014 et 2015.

▻https://www.cairn.info/revue-egypte-monde-arabe-2017-2-page-39.htm?contenu=resume

Frontex confronted with allegations of violence in North Macedonia

Allegations that officials deployed on Frontex operations have participated in or condoned violence against people on the move in North Macedonia must be investigated, says a letter (▻https://www.statewatch.org/media/2494/letter-to-frontex-sw-and-bvmn.pdf) sent to Frontex today by #Statewatch and #Border_Violence_Monitoring_Network (#BVMN).

Allegations that officials deployed on Frontex operations have participated in or condoned violence against people on the move in North Macedonia must be investigated, says a letter sent to Frontex today by Statewatch and Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN).

Since September 2019, volunteers for BVMN have gathered five separate testimonies from people pushed back from North Macedonia to Greece alleging the presence of Frontex officers on North Macedonian territory, where the agency has no legal authority to act. The reports involve a total of 130 people.

The testimonies include allegations that officers deployed by Frontex engaged in or condoned brutal violence – including the use of tasers and electroshock batons, throwing people into rivers, and tying people up and beating them.

Frontex says it has no records of any such incidents. The agency’s press office said to Statewatch last month that “Frontex does not have any operational activities at the land border from the North Macedonian side,” and “is only present on the Greek side of the border.”

The letter, addressed to Frontex’s executive director, the new Fundamental Rights Officer, and the agency’s Consultative Forum on Fundamental Rights, calls for a thorough investigation into the allegations to clarify the facts and ensure appropriate action against any individuals found to have engaged in, condoned or consented to violence and/or to have acted on North Macedonian territory.

The violence allegedly meted out or condoned by Frontex officials is part of a broader wave of violence against people on the move through North Macedonia. Since February 2019, BVMN volunteers have gathered 37 reports of pushbacks from North Macedonia to Greece, which are likely only a fraction of the total number of pushback cases.

The five reports alleging the presence of Frontex officials are a subset of 15 testimonies that cite the involvement of foreign officials working alongside North Macedonian officers.

An analysis published today by Statewatch (►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2021/foreign-agents-and-violence-against-migrants-at-the-greek-macedonian-bor) looks at the deployment of foreign border guards to North Macedonia, which since 2015 has played a key role in the EU’s efforts to prevent migrants and refugees departing from Greece to reach ‘core’ EU territory further north.

A number of states (members of the EU and other states in the region) have signed bilateral deals with the North Macedonian government that allow the deployment of border guards in the country.

Frontex, meanwhile, is not yet legally able to operate there. An agreement between the EU and North Macedonia is in the works, but is being held up in a dispute over language (►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2021/briefing-external-action-frontex-operations-outside-the-eu).

The agency must provide answers and an investigation into the numerous allegations of its officials being involved in abuse.

▻https://www.statewatch.org/news/2021/june/frontex-confronted-with-allegations-of-violence-in-north-macedonia
#Macédoine_du_Nord

Briefing: External action: Frontex operations outside the EU

The EU has negotiated five agreements with states in the Balkans that allow Frontex operations on their territories, and most of the agreements have now been approved by both sides. This briefing looks at the main provisions of those agreements, highlights key differences and similarities, and argues that they will likely serve as a template for future deals with states that do not border the EU, as made possible by the 2019 Regulation governing Frontex.

https://www.statewatch.org/media/2010/2021-03-frontex.jpg

For an overview of the key points of the agreements, see the table at the end of this article, or here as a PDF (▻https://www.statewatch.org/media/2011/eu-frontex-external-action-briefing-table.pdf).

Frontex launched its first official joint operation on non-EU territory at Albania’s border with Greece in May 2019. Still ongoing today, this was the first operation resulting from a series of Status Agreements between the EU and a number of Western Balkan states – Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia.

These agreements make it possible for Frontex to undertake operations on those other states’ territories. Signed in accordance with the agency’s 2016 Regulation, all five agreements allow the agency to carry out joint operations and rapid border interventions on the states’ borders, where those borders are coterminous with those of an EU member state or states. Frontex can also assist those states with deportation operations from EU member states to those countries. Since the entry into force of Frontex’s 2019 mandate, the EU can now also make such agreements with states that do not border EU territory.

The contents of the status agreements, all based on a template document produced by the Commission, are very similar, with small but important differences emerging from the negotiation procedures with each state, explored below.

The first agreements in context

The five Balkan states targeted for the first agreements make up what is seen by officials as a “buffer zone” between Greece and other Schengen states, and they have long been embroiled in the bloc’s border policies. Through long negotiations over accession to the Union (►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2020/albania-dealing-with-a-new-migration-framework-on-the-edge-of-the-empire), Western Balkan states are at various stages of approximating domestic law with the EU’s legal ‘acquis’, involving substantial amendments to migration and asylum systems.

In theory, these systems must match up to EU legal and fundamental rights standards in order to allow accession, though violence against migrants is well documented on both sides of these “coterminous borders”. The so-called Balkan Route is the site of well-documented abuses (▻https://www.statewatch.org/news/2021/january/eu-the-black-book-of-pushbacks-testimonies-of-pushbacks-affecting-over-1) suffered by people on the move, recently compiled and published in a ‘Black Book of pushbacks’ which detail violence perpetrated by border agents, member state police and soldiers. Pushbacks from Croatia (▻https://www.statewatch.org/news/2020/november/european-commission-plans-to-visit-croatia-in-light-of-human-rights-viol) and Hungary are particularly notorious, with Frontex finally withdrawing its support for operations in Hungary (▻https://www.statewatch.org/statewatch-database/frontex-suspends-operations-in-hungary) in January this year due to the state’s violation of a European Court of Justice ruling against pushbacks into Serbia.

The agency had long-insisted that its presence discouraged fundamental rights violations (►https://www.statewatch.org/news/2021/february/frontex-management-board-pushes-back-against-secrecy-proposals-in-prelim) - a far less credible claim in the wake of allegations (►https://www.statewatch.org/news/2021/february/frontex-management-board-pushes-back-against-secrecy-proposals-in-prelim) of Frontex complicity in serious incidents in the Aegean, including possible pushbacks.

Frontex expands external operations while future agreements remain on hold

Following deployment of officers to Montenegro’s border with Croatia in July, Frontex launched a second operation in Montenegro in October. The third executive operation outside the EU (and the second in Montenegro), the aim of this activity is “to tackle cross-border crime at the country’s sea borders, including the smuggling of drugs and weapons, smuggling of migrants, trafficking in human beings and terrorism”.

The agency says it will provide aerial surveillance, deploy officers from EU member states, and provide technical and operational assistance with coast guard functions in international waters, “including search and rescue support, fisheries control and environmental protection”.

The agreement with Serbia was approved by the European Parliament in February this year, along with the agreement with Montenegro. Three presidential entities need to sign the agreement in order for it to be ratified by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s government; the Serb entity has so far refused to do so.

Meanwhile, the agreement with North Macedonia was due to be tabled in the European Parliament this autumn, but negotiations have been held up, in part by Bulgaria’s objection to the language in which it is written. According to the site European Western Balkans, “Bulgaria does not recognise the language of North Macedonia as ‘Macedonian’”, but “as a dialect of Bulgarian”. It will apparently take “a change in terminology regarding Macedonian language in order to allow progress in drafting a final negotiating framework”. While negotiations are stalled, the agreement cannot be considered by the European Parliament.

Once the status agreements are in force, Frontex operations are launched in accordance with an operational plan agreed with each state. These plans include the circumstances under which Frontex staff can use executive powers and other details of the operations not available elsewhere. These plans are not systematically made public and although it is possible for the public to request their release, Frontex can refuse access to them. These non-public documents contain important provisions on fundamental rights and data protection, as well as details on the aims and objectives of the agency’s operations.

Fundamental rights

Under article 8 of the agreements with Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina (article 9 of the other agreements) all parties are obliged to:

“[H]ave a complaint mechanism to deal with allegations of a breach of fundamental rights committed by its staff in the exercise of their official functions in the course of a joint operation, rapid border intervention or return operation performed under this agreement”.

Both Frontex and the host state must operate such a complaints mechanism, to handle allegations against their own team members. Frontex’s complaint mechanism is currently the subject of an Ombudsman inquiry, following years of research showing it up as inaccessible and ineffective. Details of updates bringing the mechanism into line with Frontex’s 2019 Regulation have not yet been made public, although the rules set out in that Regulation have problems of their own. It is noteworthy that the agreements do not explicitly require an independent complaints mechanism.

On the question of parallel complaints mechanisms for Frontex officers and host country officers, a Frontex spokesperson explained:

“The complaints team within Frontex Fundamental Rights Office has been working since 2019 on the concept of how to deal with complaints concerning Frontex activities in [Albania]. For that purpose, the FRO team met with competent national authorities in Albania in October 2019. Both parties agreed on the draft of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the purpose of which is a coordination between both complaints mechanisms. The MoU draft proposal was shared with Albanian authorities for their consideration on September 2020 and finalization of the modalities.

The draft of this MoU will serve as basis for other third countries arrangements on the coexistence of complaints mechanisms, such as the case for Montenegro.”

An extra article 3

The agreements with Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia contain an article not included in the agreements with Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. From article 3, on launching an action:

“The Agency may propose launching an action to the competent authorities of [the host state].

The competent authorities of [the host state] may also request the Agency to consider launching an action.”

The launching of any action requires the consent of competent authorities of the host-state and of Frontex (Article 3(2) of the status agreements), while any disputes over the content of the status agreements shall be resolved between the non-EU state in question and the European Commission (Article 11).

Privileges and immunities of the members of the team

Members of teams deployed in each of the host states shall enjoy immunity from the criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction of the host state, for all acts carried out in the exercise of official functions, where these are committed in the course of actions contained in the operational plan (articles 6 or 7). It is at the discretion of the executive director of Frontex (currently Fabrice Leggeri) to determine whether acts were committed in the course of actions following the operational plan. This immunity may be waived by the team members’ home state – that is to say, the state of nationality of a Frontex team member, such as Spain or Germany.

While the agreements with Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia include the provision that the executive director’s decision will be binding upon the authorities of the host state, no such article is found in the agreements with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

A further difficulty with this article was highlighted earlier this year in an internal Frontex report: Protocol No 7 annexed to the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) and to the TFEU, under which the privileges and immunities Agency and its statutory staff are covered, is not applicable outside of the EU. The Commission has not yet responded to a request for comment on an investigation said to be underway into this issue.

Acting on behalf of the host non-EU state

Across the status agreements, members of the teams are limited to performing tasks and exercising powers in the host territory in the presence and under instructions of the host state’s border guards or other relevant authorities. The host state may authorise members of teams to act on its behalf, taking into consideration the views of the agency via its coordinating officer. The agreement with Serbia contains extra emphasis (article 5):

“the competent authority of the Republic of Serbia may authorise members of the teams to act on its behalf as long as the overall responsibility and command and control functions remain with the border guards or other police officers of the Republic of Serbia present at all times.”

This agreement also emphasises that “the members of the team referred to in paragraphs 1 and 3 to 6 do not include agency staff”.

Members of teams shall be authorised to use force, including service weapons as permitted by the host state, home state, and Frontex. Each host state may authorise members of the team to use force in the absence of border guards or other relevant staff under article 4 (6) – Albania and Bosnia and Herzegoviina – or 5 (6) – Montenegro,

Access to databases

The agreements with Albania and Montenegro allow the host state to authorise members of the team to consult national databases if necessary for the operational aims or for return operations. Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s status agreements are more cautious, allowing certain data from national databases to be shared at the request of a member of the team, provided it is needed to fulfil operational aims as outlined in the operational plan. The agreement with Serbia contains, once more, additional provisions: “members of the team may be communicated only information concerning relevant facts which is necessary for performing their tasks and exercising their powers”, though it also includes in the subsequent paragraph:

“For the purposes of fulfilling operational aims specified in the operation plan and the implementing actions, the competent authority of the Republic of Serbia and members of the team may exchange other information and findings”.

Language on discrimination

The agreement with Serbia once again follows slightly different wording to the others in terms of the prohibition of discrimination. The agreements with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia recite:

“While performing their tasks and exercising their powers, they shall not arbitrarily discriminate against persons on any grounds including sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity.”

However, the agreement with Serbia does not include (▻https://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/july/eu-frontex-in-the-balkans-serbian-government-rejects-eu-s-criminal-immun) any reference to gender identity.

Obligation to give evidence as witnesses in criminal proceedings

Under each of the agreements with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia, members of the team shall not be obliged to give evidence as witnesses. Not only does the agreement with Montenegro omit this provision, it also outlines:

“Members of the team who are witnesses may be obliged by the competent authorities of Montenegro, while respecting paragraphs 3 and 4, to provide evidence through a statement and in accordance with the procedural law of Montenegro.”

Frontex and home state obligation not to jeopardise criminal proceedings

The agreement with Serbia is the only agreement not to include an obligation on the agency and home state of a team member to “refrain from taking any measure likely to jeopardise possible subsequent criminal prosecution of the member of the team by the competent authorities” of the host non-EU state.

Lingering uncertainty

On top of uncertainty over when the agreements with North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina might be completed, questions remain regarding the accessibility of complaints mechanisms and the application of rules governing privileges and immunity of team members, even in Albania and Montenegro, where operations have been launched already.

Additionally, since the entry into force of its new regulation in 2019 and the removal of provisions limiting Frontex’s extra-EU operations only to neighbouring states, the EU can now conclude status agreements with countries not bordering the EU. The implementation of these agreements, as well as their contents, will likely set a precedent for negotiations and operations further afield.

►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2021/briefing-external-action-frontex-operations-outside-the-eu
#Albanie #Monténégro #Serbie #Bosnie #Bosnie-Herzégovine #buffer-zone #zone-tampon

Albania: dealing with a new migration framework on the edge of the empire

In 2014, Albania was formally accepted as a candidate for membership to the EU. The country is aiming to approximate its domestic law with the EU legal ’acquis’ within the next two years, prompting big changes in the country’s immigration and asylum system - at least on paper. Currently, those systems cannot be said to meet fundamental rights or EU legal standards, but given conditions within the EU itself - notably in Greece - it remains to be seen whether this will be a barrier to Albania joining the bloc.

Background

In the 1990s Albania, a small country in the middle of the Balkans, was just emerging from a harsh communist dictatorship. In 1991, a new era in Europe began for the country, as it opened diplomatic relationships with the then-European Community. But it was not until 2014 that Albania was formally accepted as a candidate for membership of the EU, following the endorsement of the European Council.[1]

In that time, the European Community had evolved into the fortress of the European Union, its borders and expansion reminiscent of the spread of the Roman Empire. Speaking of the EU’s borders, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has even commented, “big empires go down if the external borders are not well-protected”.[2] Since 2014, Albania has been racing to fulfil all the requirements needed to be accepted among the fabulous 27, making major changes in the five main areas identified by the EU: public administration, rule of law, tackling corruption, organised crime and fundamental rights.

In February 2018, the European Commission declared that further enlargement to encompass the states of the ‘Western Balkans’ (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo) would be “an investment in the EU’s security, economic growth and influence and in its ability to protect its citizens”.[3] In short, the EU was presenting a so-called win-win agreement, where all sides stand to gain.

In March 2020 – following a limping reform of the justice system, some destabilizing stop-and-go of talks between the EU and Albania, a gloomy summer election crisis in 2019, German concerns, a temporary French veto and a devastating earthquake in November 2019 – the EU finally said ‘I do’ and committed to opening accession negotiations with Albania, in a statement that underscored the need to ‘keep an eye’ on the country:

“The Council further invites the Commission to continue to monitor the progress and compliance in all areas related to the opening of negotiations and to carry out and complete the process of analytical examination of the EU acquis with the country, starting with the fundamentals’ cluster”.[4]

Aligning Albania with the EU’s “area of freedom, security and justice”

The current ‘Project Plan for European integration 2020-2022’[5] lists all the legislative reforms and changes required to align Albanian and EU law. The full approximation of Albanian law with that of the European Union, and its full and effective implementation, is one of the criteria for membership. Indeed, the process of membership negotiations is in itself that process of approximation.

The process involves the following steps: analysis of EU legislation; identification of deficiencies or contradictory acts of Albanian law; drafting or reviewing of the approximated Albanian acts; and monitoring the implementation of approximated legislation. The 24th chapter of the plan, on “justice, freedom and security”, focuses on: border control; visas; external migration; asylum; police cooperation; the fight against organised crime and terrorism; cooperation on drugs issues; customs; and judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters.

Following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the area of Freedom, Security and Justice is regulated in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, running from Article 67 to Article 89.[6] This covers secondary legislation on: border checks, asylum and immigration; police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters; judicial cooperation in civil matters; and police cooperation. Primary and secondary legislation is complemented by a large body of jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU, whose primacy is a cornerstone principle of EU law. The acquis inherited by Albania for this specific chapter consists of a volume of 392 acts, divided into a “hard acquis” (which derives from binding acts such as treaties, directives, regulations, etc.) and a “soft acquis” (which derives from standards, principles and recommendations of EU or other relevant international organizations).

Updating the laws on immigration and borders

The government affirms to have completed and adopted a comprehensive national cross-sectoral migration strategy, included a new strategy on the diaspora for the period 2018-2024.[7] The government also says it has updated a contingency plan for a possible massive influx of migrants and asylum seekers, expected to be approved soon. But the other side of the coin is that Albania, as the project plan admits, is largely unprepared to host and protect migrants on its territory. Albania currently has one reception centre for irregular migrants in Karreç, with a capacity of only 150 beds. The centre was visited in September 2019 by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which found it to be inadequate in many respects.[8] Even more concerning is the lack of facilities for unaccompanied minors.

According to a footnote in a 2016 law,[9] Albania’s border control legislation has been aligned with the Schengen Borders Code.[10] However, it appears that the wider legal framework for managing Albania’s external borders is not yet fully in line with EU standards. The government reports that the implementation of the integrated border management strategy and action plan is proceeding: the reconstruction of the two border crossing points Hani i Hotit and Morina has been completed; the country has signed a protocol with Montenegro on the establishment of joint checkpoints; the trilateral centre in Plav (in Northern Macedonia) has become operational; an agreement with Kosovo on the joint border crossing point in Morina has been concluded; anti-corruption preventive measures have been implemented at border crossing points through the installation of cameras; and cooperation between agencies and neighbouring countries has improved.

Frontex: already on the scene

The section of the government’s report on regular and irregular immigration states that the agreement with the EU permitting the deployment of Frontex officials on Albanian territory was finalised in February 2019.[11] The deployment began on 22 May 2019, for an indefinite period.[12]

The joint operation – Frontex’s first outside the EU – deploys 50 EU officers in Albania to “help Albanian authorities with border surveillance and border checks… They will also assist their Albanian counterparts in screening of migrants”.[13] This is not the first time that an EU presence has been active on Albanian territory – an Italian operation in 1997 sought to prevent migration, and there have also been monitoring missions. However, the Frontex presence is an executive mission, marking a more active departure from the monitoring exercises of the past.[14]

The Albanian Minister of Internal Affairs, Sander Lleshaj, has described the operation as “really effective, very collaborative… crucial in the way to EU integration”.[15] The Prime Minister, Edi Rama, has said the operation makes Albania a contributor to the EU in countering illegal migration and organised crime.[16] The Albanian press has so far expressed an uncritical view of the Frontex mission. In a state where many are supportive of EU accession, appetite for critical investigation is possibly low.

And asylum?

Albania reports that its Asylum Law is partially in line with the EU acquis. The country has the necessary institutions and procedures to handle asylum applications. Complaints can be filed with the National Commission for Refugees and Asylum, which was established in 2017 and reopened in 2019. All relevant national legislation should be publicly available on the government website,[17] but the information available does not clarify if complaints related to the application process are admissible, or if the word “complaints” refers to appeals related to unsuccessful applications. Regarding the asylum procedure, applications are registered by the Border and Migration Police by filling out the pre-screening forms, then reported to the Directorate of Asylum and Citizenship to proceed with the status determination procedures.

Although the number of asylum seekers increased significantly in 2018, with 5,730 arrivals, the authorities say they have responded to the large number of asylum applications. According to UNHCR asylum applications that year increased to 4,378, a 14-fold increase compared to 2017.[18] Albania’s official Gazette outlined in March 2020 that the number of people applying for asylum was at its highest in 2018, and 40 times higher than it had been in 2015.[19] According to the Project Plan for European integration, an asylum database has been functioning since April 2019; it serves as an integral data centre between the Directorate of Asylum and Citizenship, the Directorate of Border and Migration and the National Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers, exchanging information in real time between these institutions and enabling the completion of procedures as well as the issuance of statistics.

The government also says it tripled its reception capacity for asylum seekers in October 2017. Total reception capacity, including the national reception centre in Tirana and the temporary accommodation centres in Gjirokastra and Korça, reaches almost 380 places. In October 2019, a new centre with a reception capacity of 60 beds was inaugurated to cope with the expected increase of people needing temporary housing in Kapshticë/Korça,[20] which has the same parameters as the transit centre in Gërhot of Gjirokastra.

Summary

Both Albania and the EU have undergone a transformative thirty years, with talks of accession beginning six years ago. The EU sees Albania’s incorporation into the bloc as a way of contributing to the economic growth and strengthened security; a different understanding of “expanding the fortress”. Accession negotiations were reinvigorated in March 2020, and the current goal is for Albania to approximate its law to the EU acquis, and implement those measures, within two years. This includes legislation on immigration and borders, which have been updated on paper. Though conditions for asylum seekers and migrants in Albania are not in line with fundamental rights law or the EU acquis, nor are those in EU member states – most notably the Greek island hotspots. The deployment of the EU’s border agency in Albania, unlikely to be criticised locally, represents further step in the EU’s mission to control migration across a wider terrain.

Sara Ianovitz, Ph.D. in International Law

►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2020/albania-dealing-with-a-new-migration-framework-on-the-edge-of-the-empire

#Albanie

Foreign agents and violence against migrants at the Greek-Macedonian border

An increasing number of reports of violent pushbacks at the Greek-Macedonian border have been collected by volunteers in recent years. Some reports allege the presence of Frontex, but bilateral policing deals in place may also explain the presence of foreign officers in Macedonia. The violence underpins a long-standing plan to close the ‘Balkan Route’ and keep people out of ‘core’ EU territory. Whoever is behind the violence, there is no shortage of border guards to mete it out – but justice is in short supply.

Midnight in Macedonia

Around midnight on 14 August last year, a group of some 20 people were intercepted by border police just north of the Greek-Macedonian border, near the small town of Gevgelija. What happened next, according to the testimony of one member of the group, makes for grim reading.

“[T]he police officers approached the group and became physically violent. The officers struck various group-members with their batons. Others were pepper-sprayed, including the women and children. After this, the officers loaded the group into a van and left them there without any air conditioning, jammed, soaking in sweat for around two hours, while going about to catch more transit groups. In the end, they squashed around 40 people in a van for fit for ten persons.”[1]

Macedonian officials were not the only ones involved in the operation. The testimony also recounts “foreign officers wearing uniforms with the European Union flags on their shoulders,” the distinctive mark of EU border agency Frontex.

Foreign agents

The testimony is one of five reports gathered by Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), altogether involving some 130 people, that describe violence being meted out in the presence of, or even by, border guards allegedly deployed by Frontex on North Macedonian territory. A further 10 reports gathered by the network, encompassing some 123 people, recount the use of violence by foreign border guards and police officers operating in North Macedonia, but do not mention uniforms bearing the EU flag.[2]

Statewatch and Border Violence Monitoring Network have written to Frontex to demand an investigation into the allegations recounted in this article. Read more here.

The violence recounted in those testimonies is shocking. According to the report on the 14 August incident, after cramming people into the van, the police drove them to the banks of the Vardar river. There, they threw peoples’ possessions into the water, took their phones and money, and “the group was beaten brutally with metal electroshock batons and some people were thrown into the river by the police. One person was thrown in despite crying and begging not to be thrown in.” They were subsequently taken back to the border and pushed through a gate leading to the Greek side, while police beat them with electroshock batons.

In that incident, the witness said that officials with uniforms bearing EU flags were present, but did not directly participate in the violence. But a report from the same area, concerning an incident less than a week later, refers to officials in uniforms bearing Croatian, Slovenian, Czech and EU flags, who bound a group of four men with zip ties and beat three of them with batons (one of the group, who was a minor, was spared the beating).[3] Reports of other incidents allege the presence of Italian, German and Austrian officials.

No reports at Frontex

While BVMN volunteers have gathered multiple testimonies that allege Frontex’s presence or involvement in violence in North Macedonia, the agency itself says it has received no reports of any such incidents. The agency also denies any presence in the country – in May, a press officer told Statewatch that “Frontex does not have any operational activities at the land border from the North Macedonian side,” and “is only present on the Greek side of the border.”

In December 2020, Frontex responded to an access to documents request filed by Statewatch some months earlier. The request sought copies of all serious incident reports (SIRs) concerning the agency’s activities at the Greek-Macedonian land border from 1 January 2020 onwards. SIRs are supposed to be filed by officials deployed on Frontex operations for a variety of reasons, including in case of “suspected violations of fundamental rights or international protection obligations.”[4]

In its response, the agency said that it did not hold any SIRs concerning the geographic area and time period covered by the request. This does not mean, however, that the incidents recorded by BVMN did not take place – it may simply be that nobody is reporting them.

A working group set up by Frontex’s own Management Board, in response to allegations of involvement in pushbacks in Greece, found numerous problems with the agency’s reporting system. It noted that there was no way of monitoring the quality of reports submitted, and there were no confidential avenues for team members to report rights violations by their colleagues.

The report also called for “a newly introduced culture,” suggesting that the existing ambience at the agency is not one in which the rights of migrants and refugees are at the forefront of officials’ minds. The working group said that the agency needed “awareness of and sensitiveness towards possible misconduct,”[5] a call it repeated in its final report.[6]

Not even numbers

Serious incident reports may not exist, but the request from Statewatch to Frontex also sought to establish the scale of the agency’s activities at the Greek-Macedonian border through another means – by requesting data on the number of migrants and migrant smugglers apprehended at the Greek-Macedonian border over the same period (1 January 2020 onwards).

This data, argued Frontex, could not be released – doing so “would jeopardize the work of law enforcement officials and pose a hazard to the course of ongoing and future operations aimed at curtailing the activities of such networks,” despite the request seeking nothing more than figures that Frontex itself has published in previous reports.

A public evaluation of the tongue-twistingly titled ‘Joint Operation Flexible Operational Activities 2018 Land on Border Surveillance’ (JO FOA Land) says that in 2018, 16,337 migrants and 313 smugglers were apprehended in the area covered by the operation – “the ‘green borders’ of Greece with Turkey, the North Macedonia [sic] and Albania, Bulgaria with Turkey, North Macedonia and Serbia.”[7] Yet for reasons known only to Frontex, providing a breakdown of these figures for the Greek-Macedonian border would apparently undermine public security.

A significant presence

According to Frontex’s evaluation report, 25 member states took part in operations at land borders in south-eastern Europe in 2018, along with 47 officers acting as observers from six different “third countries”, namely Georgia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine. Over 1,800 officials were deployed by Frontex over the course of the year. The operations recorded 2,011 “incidents”.

A substantial Frontex presence at the border between Greece and North Macedonia has been in place since then. In a response to a parliamentary question from German MEP Özlem Demirel, the European Commission said last June that at Greece’s land borders with Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Turkey, 71 officials, 24 patrols and three “thermo-vision vans” were deployed as part of the 2020 edition of JO FOA Land. Thirteen different member states were providing contributions to the operation: Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain.[8]

While Frontex denies any physical presence on North Macedonia territory, the testimonies gathered by BVMN that allege the presence or participation of Frontex officials in violent acts raise serious questions for the agency. All the testimonies concern incidents that took place in North Macedonia, where the agency has no legal basis to operate. An agreement between the EU and North Macedonia that would permit Frontex deployments, similar to those currently in place with Montenegro and Albania, is facing hold-ups due to objections from the Bulgarian authorities.[9]

Bilateral agreements

Frontex operations are not the only deployments of foreign officials in North Macedonia. As noted above, nine of the 15 reports gathered by BVMN describing the involvement of non-Macedonian officers in pushbacks to Greece make no mention of Frontex at all. There are, however, multiple references to violence being meted out by officials in uniforms bearing the flags of Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany and Serbia.

The presence of some of these officials in the country is made possible by bilateral border control agreements. North Macedonia has cooperation agreements with eight other states in the region (Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Serbia), who provide the Macedonian authorities “with assistance from foreign police officers in patrolling the south border with Greece and in performing their daily duties.”[10] The agreement with Austria, Hungary and Serbia has come in for particular criticism, as it is a memorandum of understanding rather than a formal agreement, and therefore has faced no parliamentary scrutiny in Macedonia.[11] Germany, meanwhile, does not appear to have such a formal agreement with North Macedonia at the federal level – which makes the allegations of the presence of German officers puzzling – but the EU’s largest state has provided a ready supply of equipment, including vehicles, mobile thermal imaging cameras, boots and torches.[12]

The Croatian and Czech governments have made extensive deployments under these agreements. Between December 2015 (when Croatia and North Macedonia signed a police cooperation deal) and February 2019 “over 560 Croatian police… intercepted almost 6,000 illegal migrants in North Macedonia.”[13] The Czech deployments have been even larger – by December 2019, “1,147 police officers [had] been sent to North Macedonia” to police the border with Greece, according to the Czech government.[14]

High-level police coordination preceded the signing of many of these agreements. In July 2016, the police chiefs of 12 states said that “the deployment of foreign police officers along borders which are strongly affected by irregular migration conveys a strong message that the countries concerned are resolute in jointly coping with the migration crisis.”[15] Under the agreements with Macedonia, foreign officials can “use technical equipment and vehicles with symbols, wear uniforms, carry weapons and other means of coercion”.[16] In some instances, it seems coercion tips over into outright violence.

An incident dating from 16 August 2020, recorded by BVMN volunteers, refers to officers “with black ski masks over their faces” and “Croatian and Czech flags emblazoned on their uniforms.” The interviewees said that “these officers were violent with them – kicking the group, destroying their mobile phones, taking their money, insulting them, pushing their faces on the ground with tied hands behind the back. One of the respondents was also attacked by a dog, while the officers [were] laughing at him.”[17] As far back as March 2016, an activist supporting refugees at the increasingly well-guarded Greek-Macedonian border told the newspaper Lidovky that, in Macedonia, “the Czech police are known for violence and unprofessionalism.”[18]

Buffer states in the Balkans

Bilateral cooperation between EU states and North Macedonia extends far beyond these police cooperation agreements. In September 2020, the German Presidency of the Council of the EU described the region stretching from Turkey to Hungary (known in official jargon as the “Eastern Mediterranean/Western Balkans”) as being “of great strategic importance for the EU in terms of migration management.”[19] Significant attention is therefore being given to reinforcing the ability of states in the region to control peoples’ movements (an issue highlighted in another recent Statewatch report).

As of May 2020, 15 EU member states were providing bilateral “support” on migration issues to states in the Western Balkans through a total of 228 activities, according to a survey carried out by the Croatian Presidency of the Council of the EU. The majority of that support was focused on control measures, “namely border management and combating the smuggling of migrants (over 50% of all MS activities),” said a summary produced by the Presidency. More than 50% of the 228 activities were taking place in Serbia and North Macedonia, both of which border EU territory.[20]

The Croatian Presidency highlighted the “geopolitical importance” of those two countries, given that “Member States’ focus is on the prevention of irregular migratory movements to the EU.” This was “both expected and understandable, but may contribute to strengthening the Western Balkan partners’ self-perception as a transit region, which poses a challenge for the further improvement of all aspects of their migration capacities.” Rather than a transit region, the plan is to provide ‘capacity-building’ and technical assistance to develop buffer states that can keep people out of the ‘core’ of the EU after they depart from Greece.

https://www.statewatch.org/media/2489/2021-06-fx-mac-04.jpg

This is, of course, not a new plan. In February and March 2016, as the EU-Turkey deal was heading for agreement and in the wake of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people travelling by foot, road and rail to the ‘core’ of the EU, the ‘Balkan Route’ was declared closed by EU leaders. Initially done on the crude, discriminatory basis of nationality,[21] exclusion measures were extended to apply to all those crossing borders in the region. That process of closure continues today, and violence is a longstanding component of the strategy.[22] Indeed, it is a prerequisite for it to work effectively, and has been denounced repeatedly over the years by NGOs and international organisations. In March 2016, the Macedonian authorities sought supplies of pepper spray, tasers, rubber bullets, “special bomb (shock, with rubber balls)” and “acoustic device to break the mob.”[23] The concern now may be with smaller groups of people attempting to pass through the country, rather than with “the mob”, but the violence is no less brutal.

►https://www.statewatch.org/analyses/2021/foreign-agents-and-violence-against-migrants-at-the-greek-macedonian-bor

#Hongrie :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/514774
►https://seenthis.net/messages/651786

#Ceuta et #Melilla, #devoluciones_en_caliente qui ont lieu dans la zone située entre les différentes barrières frontalières :
►https://asile.ch/chronique/espagne-zoom-sur-ceuta-et-melilla

La fameuse « #excision_territoriale » en #Australie :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/416996

A la frontière entre franco-italienne :

Dans un amendement, l’élu a proposé « une zone limitée aux communes limitrophes ou une bande de 10 kms par rapport à la frontière. » Le gouvernement en a accepté le principe, mais « le délimitera de manière précise par décret pour coller à la réalité du terrain. »

►http://alpesdusud.alpes1.com/news/locales/67705/alpes-du-sud-refus-d-entree-pour-les-migrants-vers-une-evolution-
#France #Italie #frontière_sud-alpine

Enfant, je vivais en zone frontalière, une bande de 800 m de part et d’autre de la frontière qui avait pour principale caractéristique d’être totalement détaxée.

Les temps changent…

L’article 10 de la loi renforçant la sécurité intérieure et la lutte contre le terrorisme modifie l’article 78-2 du Code de procédure pénale relatif aux contrôles d’identités. Il permet ainsi des contrôles aux frontières pour une durée de douze heures consécutives (contre six auparavant). Il les élargit « aux abords » de 373 gares et dans un rayon de dix kilomètres des ports et aéroports au nombre des points de passage frontaliers. Bien au-delà des simples frontières de l’Hexagone, c’est une partie importante du territoire français qui est ainsi couvert, dont des villes entières comme Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, etc.

source, p.25 : ►https://www.lacimade.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/La_Cimade_Schengen_Frontieres.pdf
#France

Frontière entre #Italie et #Slovénie :

This month saw the introduction of joint Slovenian and Italian police patrols on their mutual border, raising concerns about the retrenchment of national boundaries contra the Schengen Agreement. The collaboration between authorities, due to be implemented until the end of September, mobilises four joint operations per week, with respective police forces able to enter 10km into the territory of their neighboring state in order to apprehend migrants. Mixed operations by member states signifies a growing trend towards the securitization of the EU’s internal borders, and in this case a tightening of controls on the departure point from the West Balkan route.

The patrols aim at stemming the transit of migrants from the western Slovenian regions of #Goriška and #Obalno-kraška, into the eastern region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy. Given the extensive pushback apparatus being employed by Slovenian and Croatian officials, arrival in Italy has often been the first place where persons-in-transit can apply for international protection without the threat of summary removal. However, these developments in cross border patrols highlight a growing effort on the part of the Italian government to prevent people seeking sanctuary on its territory.

(p.15-16)

►https://www.borderviolence.eu/wp-content/uploads/July-2019-Final-Report.pdf

–—

While the exact number of persons arriving via the Slovenian-Italian border is unknown, there has been a sharp rise since April (►http://www.regioni.it/dalleregioni/2020/11/09/friuli-venezia-giulia-immigrazione-fedriga-ripensare-politiche-di-controllo-) of people entering Italy from the Balkan route. Not only in Trieste, but also around the province of #Udine, arrivals have increased compared to last year. In Udine, around 100 people (►https://www.ansa.it/friuliveneziagiulia/notizie/2020/11/30/migranti-oltre-cento-persone-rintracciate-nelludinese_9fdae48d-8174-4ea1-b221-8) were identified in one day. This has been met with a huge rise in chain pushbacks, initiated by Italian authorities via readmissions to Slovenia. From January to October 2020, 1321 people (►https://www.rainews.it/tgr/fvg/articoli/2020/11/fvg-massimiliano-fedriga-migranti-arrivi-emergenza-98da1880-455e-4c59-9dc9-6) have been returned via the informal readmissions agreement , representing a fivefold increase when compared with the statistics from 2019.

But instead of dealing with this deficit in adherence to international asylum law, in recent months Italian authorities have only sought to adapt border controls to apprehend more people. Border checks are now focusing on trucks, cars and smaller border crossings (►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu4es3xXVc8&feature=youtu.be

), rather than focusing solely on the military patrols of the forested area. This fits into a strategy of heightened control, pioneered by the Governor of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region Massimiliano Fedriga who hopes to deploy more detection equipment at the border. The aim is to choke off any onward transit beyond the first 10km of Italian territory, and therefore apply the fast tracked process of readmission to the maximum number of new arrivals.

►https://seenthis.net/messages/892914

#10_km

Kuster Backs Bill To Reduce 100-Mile Zone for Border Patrol Checkpoints

Congresswoman Ann McLane Kuster is cosponsoring legislation to reduce border zones from 100 to 25 miles from the border (▻https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3852?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22border+zone%22%5D%7D&s=1&r=1), within which U.S. Customs and Border Patrol can set up immigration checkpoints.

Congressman Peter Welch of Vermont is the prime sponsor of the legislation.

Kuster was stopped at one such immigration checkpoint in June of this year. The checkpoint, on I-93 in Woodstock, around 90 miles from the border, resulted in 29 tickets for alleged immigration violations.

The violations were for legal visitors who did not have appropriate paperwork on them, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

According to a map from CityLabs, the entire state of New Hampshire falls within a border zone (which includes coastal borders).

“I think it has a chilling effect,” says Kuster. “It’s not the free and open America that we know.”

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a similar bill to the Senate.

▻https://www.nhpr.org/post/kuster-backs-bill-reduce-100-mile-zone-border-patrol-checkpoints#stream/0
#USA #Etats-Unis

Inside the Massive U.S. ’Border Zone’

All of Michigan, D.C., and a large chunk of Pennsylvania are part of the area where Border Patrol has expanded search and seizure rights. Here’s what it means to live or travel there.

▻https://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2018/05/03_Esri_Map/940.png?mod=1548686763

►https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/who-lives-in-border-patrols-100-mile-zone-probably-you-mapped/558275
#cartographie #visualisation
#100-Mile_Zone

déjà signalé sur seenthis par @reka en 2018 :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/727225

En #Hongrie, les pushbacks, largement pratiqués depuis des années, ont été légalisés en mars 2017 par de nouvelles dispositions permettant aux forces de l’ordre de refouler automatiquement toute personne interpellée sur le territoire hongrois et considérée en situation irrégulière. Ces personnes sont ramenées jusqu’à la clôture et renvoyées de l’autre côté. Si elles manifestent leur volonté de demander l’asile, on leur signifie qu’elles doivent repartir en Serbie et passer par les zones de transit. Pourtant, se trouvant géographiquement et juridiquement en Hongrie (le mur étant situé à 1,5 mètre à l’intérieur du tracé officiel de la frontière), les autorités ont l’obligation de prendre en compte ces demandes d’asile en vertu des conventions européennes et des textes internationaux dont la Hongrie est signataire.

Tiré du rapport de La Cimade (2018), pp.37-38 :
►https://www.lacimade.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/La_Cimade_Schengen_Frontieres.pdf

Le zone di transito e di frontiera – commento dell’ASGI al decreto del Ministero dell’Interno del 5 agosto 2019

Il 7 settembre 2009 sulla Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 210 (►https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2019/09/07/19A05525/sg) è stato pubblicato il decreto del Ministero dell’Interno del 5 agosto 2019 che individua le zone di transito e di frontiera dove potrà trovare applicazione la procedura accelerata per l’esame nel merito delle domande di protezione internazionale e istituisce due nuove sezioni delle Commissioni territoriali , come previsto dall’art. 28 bis co. 1 quater del D.lgs. n. 25/2008, introdotto dal d.l. n. 113/2018.

Le zone di frontiera o di transito sono individuate in quelle esistenti nelle seguenti province:

–Trieste e Gorizia;

–Crotone, Cosenza, Matera, Taranto, Lecce e Brindisi;

–Caltanissetta, Ragusa, Siracusa, Catania, Messina;

–Trapani, Agrigento;

–Città metropolitana di Cagliari e Sud Sardegna.

Il decreto ministeriale istituisce altresì due nuove sezioni , Matera e Ragusa, le quali operano rispettivamente nella commissione territoriale per il riconoscimento dello status di rifugiato di Bari, per la zona di frontiera di Matera, e nella commissione territoriale di Siracusa, per la zona di frontiera di Ragusa.

Nel commento qui pubblicato ASGI sottolinea come le nuove disposizioni paiono contrastare con le norme dell’Unione Europea perché si riferiscono in modo assolutamente generico alle “zone di transito o di frontiera individuate in quelle esistenti nelle province” e non ad aree delimitate, quali ad esempio i porti o le aree aeroportuali o altri luoghi coincidenti con frontiere fisiche con Paesi terzi non appartenenti all’Unione europea.

ASGI evidenzia come “l’applicazione delle procedure accelerate alle domande presentate nelle zone individuate nel decreto ministeriale comporta una restrizione dell’effettivo esercizio dei diritti di cui ogni straniero è titolare allorché manifesta la volontà di presentare la domanda di asilo e una conseguente contrazione del diritto di difesa, in ragione del dimezzamento dei termini di impugnazione e dell’assenza di un effetto sospensivo automatico derivante dalla proposizione del ricorso previsti, in modo differente per le varie ipotesi specifiche, dall’art. 35 bis D. Lgs. 25/08”.

A tal fine ASGI ricorda che:

– ai cittadini di Paesi terzi o apolidi tenuti in centri di trattenimento o presenti ai valichi di frontiera, comprese le zone di transito alla frontiere esterne, che desiderino presentare una domanda di protezione internazionale, gli Stati membri devono garantire l’informazione, anche sull’accesso procedura per il riconoscimento della protezione internazionale, adeguati servizi di interpretariato,
nonché l’effettivo accesso a tali aree alle organizzazioni e alle persone che prestano consulenza e assistenza ai richiedenti asilo (art. 8 Direttiva 2013/32/UE);

– gli Stati membri devono provvedere affinché l’avvocato o altro consulente legale che assiste o rappresenta un richiedente possa accedere alle aree chiuse, quali i centri di trattenimento e le zone di transito (art. 23 par. 2) e analoga possibilità deve essere garantita all’UNHCR (art. 29, par. 1);

– ai sensi dell’art. 46 par. 1 il richiedente ha diritto a un ricorso effettivo dinanzi a un giudice anche nel caso in cui la decisione sulla domanda di protezione internazionale venga presa in frontiera o nelle zone di transito.

E’ evidente, conclude ASGI nel commento al Decreto, che vi sia il rischio che lo straniero espulso o respinto e che abbia presentato domanda di protezione internazionale dopo l’espulsione o il respingimento in una zona di frontiera tra quelle indicate nel nuovo decreto ministeriale si veda esaminata la sua domanda in modo sommario mentre è trattenuto in condizioni e luoghi imprecisati e inaccessibili di fatto a difensori e organizzazioni di tutela dei diritti.

Occorre invece ribadire che la presentazione della domanda di protezione internazionale in frontiera riguarderà spesso persone rese ulteriormente vulnerabili dalle condizioni traumatiche del viaggio ed alle quali andrà perciò in ogni caso garantito un esame adeguato della domanda di protezione internazionale e l’applicazione delle garanzie e dei diritti previsti a tutela dei richiedenti protezione internazionale dalle disposizioni nazionali e dell’Unione Europea.

▻https://www.asgi.it/asilo-e-protezione-internazionale/asilo-zone-transito-frontiera

La loi renforçant la lutte contre le terrorisme étend à nouveau les contrôles d’identités frontaliers

Avant l’entrée en vigueur de la loi du 30 octobre 2017, les #contrôles_frontaliers étaient autorisés dans les espaces publics des #gares, #ports et #aéroports ouverts au trafic international (désignés par un arrêté ministériel) et dans une zone située entre la frontière terrestre et une ligne tracée de 20 kilomètres en deçà. Le législateur avait étendu les zones frontalières, notamment dans les territoires ultra-marins (où la convention de Schengen n’est pourtant pas applicable).

►https://www.editions-legislatives.fr/actualite/la-loi-renforcant-la-lutte-contre-le-terrorisme-etend-a-nouvea
#France #20_km #20_kilomètres #espace_public #gares_internationales

The Grand Chamber Judgment in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary: Immigration Detention and how the Ground beneath our Feet Continues to Erode

The ECtHR has been for a long time criticized for its approach to immigration detention that diverts from the generally applicable principles to deprivation of liberty in other contexts. As Cathryn Costello has observed in her article Immigration Detention: The Ground beneath our Feet, a major weakness in the Court’s approach has been the failure to scrutinize the necessity of immigration detention under Article 5(1)(f) of the ECHR. The Grand Chamber judgment in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary delivered on 21 November 2019 has further eroded the protection extended to asylum-seekers under the Convention to the point that restrictions imposed upon asylum-seekers might not even be qualified as deprivation of liberty worthy of the protection of Article 5. The Grand Chamber overruled on this point the unanimously adopted Chamber judgment that found that the holding of asylum-seekers in the ‘transit zone’ between Hungary and Serbia actually amounts to deprivation of liberty.

In this blog, I will briefly describe the facts of the case, the findings of the Grand Chamber under Article 3 ECHR that was also invoked by the applicants and then I will focus on the reasoning as to the applicability of Article 5.

The case concerned two Bangladeshi nationals who transited through Greece, the Republic of Northern Macedonia (as it is now known) and Serbia before reaching Hungary, where they immediately applied for asylum. They found themselves in the transit zone on the land border between Hungary and Serbia, where they were held for 23 days pending the examination of their asylum applications. The applications were rejected on the same day on the ground that the applicants had transited through Serbia that, according to Hungary, was a safe third country. The rejections were confirmed on appeal, an order for their expulsion was issued, the applicants were escorted out of the transit zone and they crossed back into Serbia.

Procedural Breach of Article 3 ECHR

The Grand Chamber established that Hungary ‘failed to discharge its procedural obligation under Article 3 of the Convention to assess the risks of treatment contrary to that provision before removing the applicants from Hungary’ to Serbia (para 163). No finding was made on the issue as to whether Hungary was substantively in breach of the right not to be subjected to refoulement given the conditions in Serbia and the deficiencies in the Serbian asylum procedures that might lead to chain refoulement. This omission follows a trend in the Court’s reasoning that can be described as a procedural turn: focus on the quality of the national decision making processes rather than on the substantive accuracy of the decisions taken at national level.[1] This omission, however, had important consequences for the application of Article 5 to the applicants’ case, the most controversial aspect in the Grand Chamber’s reasoning.

The Chamber’s reasoning under Article 5 ECHR

On this aspect, the Grand Chamber departed from the Chamber’s conclusion that the applicants were deprived of their liberty. The fundamental question here is whether ‘the stay’ (Hungary used the term ‘accommodation’) of asylum-seekers in the ‘transit zone’ with an exit door open to Serbia, but closed to Hungary, amounts to deprivation of liberty (i.e. detention) in the sense of Article 5 ECHR. Asylum seekers in the transit zone were denied access to the Hungarian territory,[2] but they could leave to Serbia. This creates a complex intertwinement between deprivation of liberty (Article 5(1)(f)) normally understood as not allowing somebody to leave a place, on the one hand, and not allowing somebody to enter a place. Entering a State can be very relevant from the perspective of the obligation upon this State not to refoule, which necessitates a procedure for determining whether there is a risk of refoulement.

In its judgment from 14 March 2017 the Chamber unanimously answered in positive: by holding them in the transit zone, Hungary deprived the applicants from their liberty, which was in violation of Article 5(1)(f) since this measures had no legal basis in the national law. The Chamber clarified that‘[t]he mere fact that it was possible for them to leave voluntarily returning to Serbia which never consented to their readmission cannot rule out an infringement of the right to liberty.’ (para 55). In this way the Chamber reaffirmed the reasoning in Amuur v France where the Court observed ‘[…] this possibility [to leave voluntary the country] becomes theoretical if no other country offering protection comparable to the protection they expect to find in the country where they are seeking asylum is inclined or prepared to take them in.’ (para 48) It follows that although the transit zone at the French airport was, as France argued, “open to the outside”, the applicants were still considered as having been detained since this ‘outside’ did not offer a level of protection comparable to the one in France.

The Chamber followed this reasoning from Amuur v France in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary, which led to the recognition that ‘[…] the applicants could not have left the transit zone in the direction of Serbia without unwanted and grave consequences, that is, without forfeiting their asylum claims and running the risk of refoulement’ (para 55). The Chamber also added that ‘To hold otherwise would void the protection afforded by Article 5 of the Convention by compelling the applicants to choose between liberty and the pursuit of a procedure ultimately aimed to shelter them from the risk of exposure to treatment in breach of Article 3 of the Convention.’ (para 56)

The ‘practical and realistic’ approach of the Grand Chamber under Article 5 ECHR

The Grand Chamber in its reasoning broke precisely this linkage between the applicability of Article 5 (the qualification of a treatment as deprivation of liberty) and Article 3 (protection from refoulement). The Grand Chamber performed the following important moves to achieve this. First, it stated that ‘its approach should be practical and realistic, having regard to the present-day conditions and challenges’, which implied that States were not only entitled to control their borders, but also ‘to take measures against foreigners circumventing restrictions on immigration.’ (para 213). With Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary the Court has thus added another nuance to its well-established point of departure in cases dealing with migrants. This point of departure has been that States are entitled, subject to their treaty obligations, to control their borders. The new addition introduced with Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary and also repeated in Z.A. and Others v Russia, a Grand Chamber judgment issued on the same day, concerns States’ right to prevent ‘foreigners circumventing restrictions on immigration’. This addition, however, does not seem appropriate given that the applicants themselves in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary never circumvented any immigration control restrictions. They applied immediately for asylum.

This ‘practical and realistic approach’ also implied an endorsement of the representation of the situation as one of ‘crisis’:[3] ‘the Court observes that the Hungarian authorities were in conditions of a mass influx of asylum-seekers and migrants at the border, which necessitated rapidly putting in place measures to deal with what was clearly a crisis situation.’ (para 228) In the same paragraph, the Grand Chamber went on to almost praise Hungary for having processed the applicants’ claims so fast event though it was ‘a crisis’: ‘Despite the ensuring very significant difficulties, the applicants’ asylum claims and their judicial appeals were examined within three weeks and two days.’ It appears as if the Grand Chamber at this stage had already forgotten its findings made earlier in the judgment under Article 3 that the national procedure for examining the applicants’ claims was deficient. This ultimately gave the basis for the Grand Chamber to find a violation of Article 3.

The distinction based on how asylum-seekers arrive and the type of border they find themselves at

The second move performed by the Grand Chamber implied the introduction of a distinction between ‘staying at airport transit zones’ (para 214) and at reception centers located on islands (para 216), on the one hand, and a transit zone located on the land border between two Council of Europe Member States (para 219). This meant, as the Court reasoned, that the applicants did not have to take a plane to leave the zone, they could simply walk out of the zone. In other words, it was practically possible for them to do it on their own and they did not need anybody’s help. As the Court continued to reason in para 236, ‘Indeed, unlike the case of Amuur, where the French courts described the applicants’ confinement as an “arbitrary deprivation of liberty”, in the present case the Hungarian authorities were apparently convinced that the applicants could realistically leave in the direction of Serbia [emphasis added].’ This quotation also begs the comment as to why what the national authorities were or were not convinced about actually mattered. In addition, the reference in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary as to how the national authorities had qualified the situation is also bizarre given that ‘deprivation of liberty’ is an autonomous concept under the Convention. On this point, the two dissenting judges, Judge Bianku and Judge Vućinić criticized the majority by highlighting that ‘the Court has reiterated on many occasions that it does not consider itself bound by the domestic courts’ legal conclusions as to the existence of a deprivation of liberty.’

Narrowing down the importance of Amuur v France

The third move performed by the Court is playing down the importance of and narrowing the relevance of Amuur v France. In Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary the Grand Chamber reiterated (para 239) the most significant pronouncement from Amuur: the possibility to leave the zone ‘becomes theoretical if no other country offering protection comparable to the protection they expect to find in the country where they are seeking asylum is included to take them in.’ It then noted that this reasoning ‘must be read in close relation to the factual and legal context in that case.’ This meant that in contrast to the situation in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary, in Amuur the applicants could not leave ‘without authorization to board an airplane and without diplomatic assurance concerning their only possible destination, Syria, a country “not bound by the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.’ (para 240) On this point Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary can be also distinguished from Z.A. and Others v Russia, where the Grand Chamber observed that ‘[…] unlike in land border transit zones, in this particular case leaving the Sheremetyevo airport transit zone would have required planning, contacting aviation companies, purchasing tickets and possibly applying for a visa depending on the destination.’ (para 154) For the applicants in Ilias and Ahmed ‘it was practically possible […] to walk to the border and cross into Serbia, a country bound by the Geneva Convention.’ (para 241). The Grand Chamber acknowledged that the applicants feared of the deficiencies in the Serbian asylum procedure and the related risk of removal to the Republic of North Macedonia or Greece. (para 242) However, what seems to be crucial is that their fears were not related to ‘direct threat to their life or health’ (para 242). It follows that the possibility to leave for a place will not preclude the qualification of the situation as one of detention, only if this place poses a direct threat to life or health.

As noted by the two dissenting judges, it did not seem to matter for the majority that the applicants could not enter Serbia lawfully. In this way, the majority’s reasoning under Article 5 appears to endorse a situation where people are just pushed out of the border without some formal procedures with elementary guarantees.

Read as a whole the Grand Chamber judgment in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary is inconsistent: it contains two findings that are difficult to square together. The Court concluded that since the applicants would not be exposed to a direct risk in Serbia, they were not detained in Hungary. At the same time, Hungary violated Article 3 of the Convention since it did not conduct a proper assessment of the risks that the applicants could face if they were to return to Serbia.

Overall weakening of the protection of Article 5 ECHR

One final comment is due. In Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary, the Grand Chamber summarized the following factors for determining whether ‘confinement of foreigners in airport transit zones and reception centers’ can be defined as deprivation of liberty: ‘i) the applicants’ individual situation and their choices, ii) the applicable legal regime of the respective country and its purpose, iii) the relevant duration, especially in the light of the purpose and the procedural protection enjoyed by applicants pending the events, and iv) the nature and degree of the actual restrictions imposed on or experienced by the applicants.’ (para 217) (see also Z.A. and Others v Russia, para 145) Among these criteria particular attention needs to be directed to the applicable legal regime and the availability of procedural protection. In principle, Article 5, if found applicable, offers certain guarantees (e.g. statutory basis for the deprivation of liberty, access to proceedings for challenging the lawfulness of the detention). The Court seems to have inserted such considerations at the definitional stage of its analysis. For example, in Z.A. and Others v Russia, the Grand Chamber when it examined whether the confinement of the applicants in the airport transit zone amounted to deprivation of liberty, noted that they were left ‘in a legal limbo without any possibility of challenging the measure restricting their liberty’ (para 146). This played a role for the Grand Chamber to conclude that the applicants in Z.A. and Others v Russia were indeed deprived of liberty and Article 5 was thus found applicable. In contrast, the Grand Chamber in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary observed that certain procedural guarantees applied to the applicants’ case (para 226), which also played a role for the final conclusion that Article 5 was not applicable. In sum, instead of scrutinizing the national legal regime and the access to procedural guarantees as part of the substantive analysis under Article 5, where a single deficiency leads to a finding of a violation (i.e. it is sufficient to find a violation of Article 5 if there is no strictly defined statutory basis for the applicants’ detention), the Court has muddled these criteria together with other factors and made them pertinent for the definitional analysis. This ultimately weakens the roles of these criteria and creates uncertainty.

[1] See V Stoyanova, ‘How Exception must “Very Exceptional” Be? Non-refoulement, Socio-Economic Deprivation and Paposhvili v Belgium’ (2017) International Journal of Refugee Law 29(4) 580.

[2] See B Nagy, ‘From Reluctance to Total Denial: Asylum Policy in Hungary 2015-2018’ in V Stoyanova and E Karageorgiou (eds) The New Asylum and Transit Countries in Europe during and in the Aftermath of the 2015/2016 Crisis (Brill 2019) 17.

[3] Boldizsar Nagy has argued that this representation made by the Hungarian government is a lie. See B Nagy, Restricting access to asylum and contempt of courts: illiberals at work in Hungary, ▻https://eumigrationlawblog.eu/restricting-access-to-asylum-and-contempt-of-courts-illiberals-at

▻https://strasbourgobservers.com/2019/12/23/the-grand-chamber-judgment-in-ilias-and-ahmed-v-hungary-immigra
#justice #CEDH #Hongrie #CourEDH

Entre la #Pologne et la #Biélorussie :

Si cette famille a pu être aidée, c’est aussi parce qu’elle a réussi à dépasser la zone de l’état d’urgence : une bande de 3 km tracée par la Pologne tout du long de sa frontière avec la Biélorussie, formellement interdite d’accès aux organisations comme aux journalistes.
Le long de la frontière, les migrants se retrouvent donc seuls entre les gardes-frontières polonais et biélorusses. Côté polonais, ils sont ramenés manu militari en Biélorussie… En Biélorussie, ils sont également refoulés : depuis octobre, le pays refuse de laisser entrer les migrants déjà passés côté européen. « La seule chance de sortir de la Pologne, c’est d’entrer en Biélorussie. La seule chance de sortir de la Biélorussie, c’est d’entrer en Pologne. C’est comme un ping-pong », confie Nelson (pseudonyme), un migrant originaire de la République démocratique du Congo qui a contacté notre rédaction.

►https://seenthis.net/messages/948199
et plus précisément ici :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/948199#message948201

–-

Et l’article de Médiapart :
Entre la Pologne et le Belarus, les migrants abandonnés dans une #zone_de_non-droit
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/948199#message948202

« À titre de mesures compensatoires à l’entrée en vigueur de la convention de Schengen – qui, du reste, n’était pas encore applicable –, la loi du 10 août 1993 instaure les contrôles dits frontaliers : la police, la gendarmerie et la douane peuvent vérifier l’identité de toute personne, pour s’assurer qu’elle respecte les obligations liées à la détention d’un titre de circulation ou de séjour, dans la zone frontalière et dans les zones publiques des ports, aéroports et gares ouvertes au trafic international. La zone frontalière est une bande de terre, large de 20 km, longeant la frontière terrestre ; les ports, gares ou autres aérogares visés figurent sur une longue liste fixée par un arrêté ministériel. »

(Ferré 2018 : 16)

–-

« Il suffit de passer quelques heures à la gare de Menton pour le constater. Pour les personnes présumées étrangères, la liberté d’aller et de venir dans les espaces placés sous surveillance est restreinte. Elle a encore été réduite avec la loi du 30 octobre 2017 renforçant la sécurité intérieure et la lutte contre le terrorisme qui modifie, une fois de plus, le texte de loi sur les contrôles d’identité en étendant les zones frontalières autour de certains ports et aéroports qui constituent des points de passage frontaliers au sens du code frontières Schengen, soit « tout point de passage autorisé par les autorités compétentes pour le franchissement des frontières extérieures ». Dans ces nouvelles zones, la police pourra procéder à des opérations de contrôle sans avoir besoin de motiver son intervention. La loi de 2017 a également prévu que les contrôles frontaliers puissent s’effectuer « aux abords des gares » et non plus seulement dans les zones publiques de ces lieux. La formulation souffre, c’est peu de le dire, d’un manque de précision qui donne plus de latitude encore aux forces de l’ordre. »

(Ferré 2018 : 19)

source : Nathalie Ferré, « La France s’enferme à double tour », Plein Droit, 2018, n°116.

#20_km #20_kilomètres

#Pyrénées, frontière #Espagne-#France, témoignage d’une personne ayant acheté un terrain en zone frontalière :

« En ce moment, on croise plein de voitures de forces de l’ordre, ce qui est étonnant en plein hiver car il n’y a personne. Il y a aussi des barrages de police réguliers car ils savent que des gens se font prendre sur la route », raconte Camille Rosa, cofondatrice d’une cantine solidaire à Perpignan. « On a acheté avec des copains un petit terrain vers Cerbère. Un jour, des gendarmes sont venus fouiller notre camion alors que mes enfants faisaient la sieste à l’intérieur. J’ai tenté de m’interposer, mais ils m’ont dit que sur la #zone_frontalière, ils avaient une #commission_rogatoire_permanente », poursuit-elle.

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/950934

Abus de pouvoir, je pense. Mais un camion est un véhicule…
▻https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGIARTI000037399447/2022-02-27/?isSuggest=true

#France :

Le contrôle d’identité « Schengen » permet de vérifier le respect des obligations liées aux titres et documents d’identité et de voyage. Il peut avoir lieu dans une zone située à moins de #20_kilomètres de la frontière terrestre séparant la France d’un pays limitrophe (Allemagne, Belgique, Espagne, Italie, Luxembourg et Suisse). Si le contrôle a lieu sur l’autoroute ou dans un train, la zone s’étend jusqu’au 1er péage ou l’arrêt après les 20 kilomètres. Le contrôle peut être effectué dans un port, un aéroport ou une gare et ses abords accessible au public et ouverte au trafic international. Le contrôle ne peut pas être pratiqué plus de 12 heures consécutives dans un même lieu et ne peut pas être systématique.

Depuis la loi n° 2017-1510 du 30 octobre 2017 renforçant la sécurité intérieure, des contrôles d’identité peuvent également être effectués dans un rayon de #10_kilomètres autour de certains #ports et #aéroports sur le territoire.

C’est ce dernier contrôle qui concerne majoritairement les personnes se présentant à la frontière francoitalienne, mais certaines situations suivies par les militants locaux laissent penser que d’autres types de contrôles ont pu servir pour justifier les arrestations de personnes au-delà de la bande des 20 kilomètres ou des zones transfrontalières.

Rapport de l’Anafé, Persona non grata, 2019 : ►http://www.anafe.org/spip.php?article520

–—

Rapport CNCDH 2018, p.7 :

« la préfète des Hautes-Alpes a expliqué que la zone permettant de procéder à des refus d’entrée avait été définie par son prédécesseur mais qu’elle ne correspondait pas nécessairement à la bande des 20 kms14. Selon la PAF, les refus d’entrée peuvent être prononcés dès lors que l’étranger est contrôlé sur le territoire des communes de Montgenèvre et Nevache, et donc jusqu’à l’entrée de Briançon. »
Il convient de rappeler que des contrôles aléatoires, hors du cadre dérogatoire prévu en cas de rétablissement des frontières, peuvent être opérés, conformément à l’article 78-2 du code de procédure pénale, dans une zone comprise entre la frontière terrestre de la France avec les Etats de l’espace et une ligne tracée à 20 kilomètres en deçà, ainsi que dans les zones accessibles au public des ports, aéroports et gares ferroviaires ou routières ouverts au trafic international et désignés par arrêté et aux abords de ces gares. Ces contrôles sont toutefois strictement encadrés, notamment par la jurisprudence de la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne. Les personnes interpellées sur ce fondement peuvent faire l’objet d’une procédure de réadmission. En revanche, lorsque les contrôles aux frontières intérieures sont rétablis, les autorités françaises peuvent refuser l’entrée aux étrangers ne remplissant pas les conditions d’entrée sur le territoire aux frontières terrestres et leur notifier une décision de non-admission. Ces étrangers sont considérés comme n’étant pas entrés sur le territoire

▻https://www.cncdh.fr/fr/publications/avis-sur-la-situation-des-migrants-la-frontiere-franco-italienne

#10_km #20_km

100-MILE BORDER ENFORCEMENT ZONE

https://i.imgur.com/w232VTW.png

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/963608

Et à qui appartiennent les #îlots dans la région de l’#Evros ?

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L477xH678/iPZn7yQpng-42ef2-b09a4.png

Dans ce fil de discussion :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/968374
et plus précisément ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/968374#message969971

#Thrace #Grèce #Turquie

No man’s land: three people seeking asylum stuck in Cyprus’s #buffer_zone

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH403/Od9vDm1png-11f9d-b0ee1.png

#Chypre #Chpre_du_Nord #Turquie

Novembre 2022 :
Le maintien en zone d’attente des rescapés de l’Ocean Viking dans la zone portuaire militaire de #Toulon et dans un #centre_de_vacances de la #presqu’île de #Giens à #Hyères :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/979556

Sur le #Bibby_Stockholm barge at #Portland Port :

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/c51ea9690-856390/O3svwnZiAyTQ/Q60HYouNPxgQwJejO4z6GXGM8DaTejBjJC1q8NXT.png

“Since the vessel is positioned below the mean low water mark, it did not require planning permission”

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1000870#message1011761

voir aussi :

“The circumstances at Portland Port are very different because where the barge is to be positioned is below the mean low water mark. This means that the barge is outside of our planning control and there is no requirement for planning permission from the council.”

►https://news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/2023/07/18/leaders-comments-on-the-home-office-barge

#UK #Angleterre

The ‘Border’ under EU Law

The first argument made by the Catania Tribunal regards the correct initiation of a border procedure. According to the judge, the procedure was not applied „at the border“, as understood by EU law (Art. 43 Directive 2013/32). Indeed, the applicants arrived and made their asylum application in Lampedusa (province of Agrigento) but the detention was ordered several days later in Pozzallo (Ragusa province) when the applicants were no longer „at the border.“ Because the border procedure (involving detention) was utilized at a later stage and in a different place, it was not appropriately initiated.

In support of the Catania Tribunal’s conclusion, we should recall that Article 43 the Procedures Directive requires a spatial and temporal link between the border crossing and the activation of the border procedure (►https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32013L0032). Although the Directive does not define the terms „border“ or „transit zone“, it clearly distinguishes these areas from other „locations in the proximity of the border or transit zone“ (Article 43(3)), where applicants can be exceptionally accommodated but never detained. The distinction between the border and other places in its vicinity suggests that the procedure provided for in Art. 43 can only be applied in narrow and well-defined areas or in pre-identified transit zones (such as the Hungarian transit zones examined by the Court in FMS and Commission v Hungary).

Other EU law instruments support this narrow interpretation of the “border” concept. Regulation 1931/2006 defines a „border area“ as a delimited space within 30 km from the Member State’s border. In the Affum case, the Court also called for a narrow interpretation of the spatial concept of „border.“ There, the Court clarified that the Return Directive allows Member States to apply a simplified return procedure at their external borders in order to „ensure that third-country nationals do not enter [their] territory“ (a purpose which resonates with that of Art. 8(3)(c) Reception Directive). However, such a procedure can only be applied if there is a „direct temporal and spatial link with the crossing of the border“, i.e. „at the time of the irregular crossing of the border or near that border after it has been crossed“ (par. 72).

By contrast, under the Italian accelerated procedure, the border has blurred contours. The new procedure, relying on the “#fiction_of_non-entry” (►https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/654201/EPRS_STU(2020)654201_EN.pdf), can be carried out not only „at“ the border and in transit zones or in areas territorially „close“ to the border, but in entire provinces in southern and northern Italy. This far exceeds the narrow definition of border or border area derived from EU law.

►https://seenthis.net/messages/1018938#message1023987
#fiction_de_non-entrée

–—

Ce terme est empruntée d’une vieille loi des Etats-Unis, The Immigration Act 1891 :

“The Immigration Act 1891 was the first to expressly mention detention, as it made provision for officers to ’inspect all such aliens’ or ’to orcier a temporary removal of such aliens for examination at a de ignated time and place, and then and there detain them until a thorough inspection is made’. The Act alsa created the very important provision that came to be known as the ’entry fiction’. According to this, a removal to shore for examination ’shall not be considered a landing during the pendency of such examination’. This was a criticallegal (and constitutional) innovation because it meant that th ose incarcerated must be treated as if they were not there. This was both an attempt to treat the place of detention as if it were sim ply an extension ofbeing held on board ship, but also something more serious. The concept of being physically detained within the territorial land-mass of the United States but not being considered legally present was radical. It suggested a kind of limbo - with the detention centre constituting perhaps an extra-legal space- putting immigrants beyond the reach of constitutional norms, pending a final executive decision to land or deport them.”

source : Daniel Wilsher, Immigration detention : law, history, politics, 2012, p. 13

#Green_Border

Dans le film Green Border, on voit bien la mise en place d’une bande frontalière (#zone_interdite / #état_d'urgence) où les activistes n’ont pas le droit d’entrer et les réfugiés sont instrumentalisés par la #Pologne et la #Biélorussie :

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L515xH700/4070311jpg-995ae-fb73f.jpg

►https://seenthis.net/messages/1041323

#zone_d'exclusion

Autour du nouveau #pacte (#Pacte_européen_sur_la_migration_et_l’asile)

3) Introduzione del concetto di “finzione del non ingresso”

Il patto introduce il concetto di “finzione giuridica di non ingresso”, secondo il quale le zone di frontiera sono considerate come non parte del territorio degli Stati membri. Questo interessa in particolare l’Italia, la Grecia e la Spagna per gli sbarchi della rotta mediterranea, mentre sono più articolati “i confini” per la rotta balcanica. Durante le 12 settimane di attesa per l’esito della richiesta di asilo, le persone sono considerate legalmente “non presenti nel territorio dell’UE”, nonostante esse fisicamente lo siano (in centri di detenzione ai confini), non avranno un patrocinio legale gratuito per la pratica amministrativa e tempi brevissimi per il ricorso in caso di un primo diniego (e in quel caso rischiano anche di essere espulse durante l’attesa della decisione che li riguarda). In assenza di accordi con i paesi di origine (come nella maggioranza dei casi), le espulsioni avverranno verso i paesi di partenza.

Tale concetto creadelle pericolose “zone grigie” in cui le persone in movimento, trattenute per la procedura accelerata di frontiera, non potranno muoversi sul territorio né tantomeno accedere a un supporto esterno. Tutto questo in spregio del diritto internazionale e della tutela della persona che, sulla carta, l’UE si propone(va) di difendere.

►https://seenthis.net/messages/1050383

Bloccati da 50 giorni nella zona di transito

Quattro famiglie curde sono ferme nell’aeroporto di Kloten in attesa di essere rimpatriate.

Ricorda molto da vicino il film con Tom Hanks, «The Terminal», la vicenda di quattro famiglie curde bloccate nella zona di transito dell’aeroporto di Kloten (ZH). Quanto riportato da Watson.ch, tuttavia, è lungi dall’essere una sceneggiatura hollywoodiana quanto piuttosto la realtà di 20 persone impossibilitate a lasciare l’aeroporto zurighese.

Le famiglie provengono da Siria, Turchia e Iraq, e sono arrivate in Svizzera passando dal Sud Africa prima di cercare asilo nel nostro paese.

Per alcune di queste richieste, la Segreteria di Stato per la migrazione (SEM) e il Tribunale amministrativo federale hanno deciso di non entrare nel merito. Le persone interessate devono quindi tornare in Sud Africa. La data di partenza, tuttavia, non è ancora nota. La legge consente al SEM di detenere i rifugiati fino a 60 giorni nella zona di transito.

«Piangono spesso» - Mustafa Mamay, giornalista curdo proveniente dalla Turchia è una di quelle persone intrappolate a Kloten (ZH). Secondo lui, la vita di tutti i giorni è molto pesante, sia in termini di mancanza di spazio, per il rumore e la noia. «Tutti gli uomini dormono in una stanza e tutte le donne e i bambini dormono in un’altra stanza. Le camere non hanno finestre», spiega. I curdi temono di essere rispediti in Sud Africa, poi in Turchia dove rischiano l’imprigionamento e la tortura.

Secondo Watson.ch, tra i rifugiati vi sono otto bambini. Mustafa Mamay conferma che la situazione è particolarmente difficile per loro. «Molti dormono male e non mangiano più. Piangono spesso. Vorrebbero andare fuori a giocare, ma non possono».

«È una vergogna» - Per la consigliera nazionale Sibel Arlsan (Verdi) si tratta di una situazione inaccettabile: «È contrario ai diritti umani, una vera vergogna. È un’esperienza svilente e traumatizzante, soprattutto per i bambini».

Il rinvio in Sudafrica, secondo lei, resta inammissibile perché, in quella nazione, la loro incolumità non sarebbe garantita: «Non sappiamo se da lì saranno poi rinviati in Turchia dove finirebbero molto probabilmente in carcere».

Rinvio solo se sicuro - Contattata, la SEM garantisce che ogni richiesta è trattata in maniera individuale, «nel rispetto delle leggi nazionali e internazionali» e «tiene da conto dell’integrità e della sicurezza dei migranti», spiega il portavoce Lukas Rieder. In ogni caso «nessuno viene rimandato in paesi considerati «non sicuri»»

«Possono muoversi liberamente» - In ogni caso, continua Rieder, la situazione delle famiglie curde a Zurigo è tutt’altro che disumana: «Hanno la possibilità di uscire all’aria aperta e possono muoversi liberamente. Possono anche prendere il trenino-metropolitana fino alla zona E dei gate. Lì ci sono edicole, ristoranti e negozi». Se ve ne fosse bisogno «hanno a disposizione un team medico e psicologico».

▻https://www.tio.ch/svizzera/cronaca/1332119/bloccati-da-50-giorni-nella-zona-di-transito

#limbe #terminal #attente #no-solution #migrations #asile #réfugiés #aéroports #transit #zone-tampon #limbo #rétention #captivité #migrerrance #zone_de_transit

v. aussi la métaliste sur des cas similaires :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/720652

Pour en savoir plus sur ces personnes, v. ce billet :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/731104

Zurich Des enfants bloqués depuis des semaines à l’aéroport

Quatre familles kurdes se retrouvent coincées à Kloten (ZH) depuis une cinquantaine de jours. Une politicienne est scandalisée. La Confédération, elle, se défend.

Les témoignages recueillis par Watson.ch sont à peine croyables. Un scénario digne du film « Terminal » dans lequel Tom Hanks se retrouve bloqué à l’aéroport de New York pendant 9 longs mois parce qu’une guerre civile a éclaté dans son pays.

Or les récits relayés par le site alémanique n’ont rien à voir avec un film hollywoodien, mais reflètent le triste quotidien de vingt Kurdes, actuellement coincés en zone de transit à l’aéroport de Zurich. Certains s’y trouvent depuis sept longues semaines. Les quatre familles, provenant de Syrie, de Turquie et d’Irak, sont arrivées en Suisse via l’Afrique du Sud avant de demander l’asile dans notre pays.

Pour certaines de ces demandes, le Secrétariat d’État aux migrations (SEM) et le Tribunal administratif fédéral ont décidé de ne pas entrer en matière. Les personnes concernées doivent donc retourner en Afrique du Sud. La date du départ, elle, n’est pas encore connue. La loi autorise le SEM a retenir les réfugiés durant 60 jours au maximum dans la zone de transit.

« Ils pleurent souvent »

Mustafa Mamay, un journaliste kurde venant de Turquie, fait partie de ces personnes coincées à Kloten (ZH). Selon lui, le quotidien y est très pesant, tant au niveau du manque de place, du bruit et de l’ennui. « Tous les hommes dorment dans une pièce et toutes les femmes et les enfants dorment dans une autre pièce. Les chambres n’ont pas de fenêtres », explique-t-il au site d’information alémanique. Il explique que tous craignent d’être renvoyés en Afrique du Sud, puis en Turquie où ils risquent l’emprisonnement et la torture.

Selon Watson.ch, huit enfants figurent parmi les réfugiés kurdes. Mustafa Mamay confirme que la situation est particulièrement difficile pour eux. Nombre d’entre eux dormiraient mal et ne mangeraient plus. « Ils pleurent souvent et veulent aller jouer dehors. »

« C’est douteux ! »

Pour la conseillère nationale Sibel Arslan (Verts/BS), cette situation est inacceptable. « Que des familles soient retenues si longtemps alors qu’elles n’ont rien fait et qu’elles ont juste fait usage de leur droit humanitaire est douteux ! Ça peut être traumatisant, surtout pour les enfants. » Renvoyer les familles en Afrique du Sud revient à bafouer la convention relative au statut des réfugiés, critique la Bâloise, qui estime que l’Afrique du Sud ne peut pas être considérée comme un état tiers sûr. « Nous ne savons pas si depuis là les réfugiés sont renvoyés en Turquie, où ils seront très probablement emprisonnés. »

Contacté, le SEM assure que chaque demande est traitée individuellement dans le cadre des lois nationales et internationales. « Le SEM vérifie si un état tiers est éventuellement responsable et s’assure que la sécurité et l’intégrité des migrants soient garanties », informe le porte-parole Lukas Rieder. Dans tous les cas, dit-il, les personnes ne sont pas renvoyées dans un pays qui n’est pas considéré comme sûr.

Pris en charge médicale et psychologique

Lukas Rieder défend par ailleurs les conditions de vie dans l’espace de transit : « A l’aéroport de Zurich, les requérants d’asile ont la possibilité de sortir à l’air libre et ils peuvent se déplacer librement dans la zone. Ils peuvent prendre le métro pour se rendre au dock E où il y a des kiosques, des magasins, des restaurants et une grande terrasse extérieure. »

Pour finir, le porte-parole rappelle que les migrants ont accès, en cas de besoin, à une prise en charge médicale et psychologique.

https://external-mrs1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQAxMSf2GPl2W6Ip&w=540&h=282&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmcdn.newsnetz.ch%2Fstory%2F1%2F6%2F1%2F16149117%2Fpictures%2F1%2Fteaser_t_1024.jpg%3F1&cfs=1&upscale=1&fallback=news_d_placeholder_publisher&_nc_hash=AQAoECIU_MPeIOWt#.jpg

Nouveau cas à #Zurich, en Suisse :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/731568

Témoignage de #Lisa_Bosia sur FB suite à l’annonce des 13 demandeurs d’asile bloqués à #Zurich :

Era successo anche a mio marito e ai suoi famigliari. Kurdi in fuga dalla 1a Guerra del Golfo. A Kloten, le famiglie furono separate, uomini da una parte e donne dall’altra. Gli uomini furono caricati in aereo e rispediti a Bucarest, da dove l’aereo era partito. (All’epoca, la Romania era l’unico paese che dava il visto agli Irakeni in fuga dal Kuwait). E niente, la Romania non li ha voluti, rimandati a Zurigo sono stati un giorno è una notte sotto l’aereo, poi una settimana nella zona di transito. Alla fine, non sapendo cosa farne li hanno ammessi alla procedura alla SEM. All’epoca la domanda di asilo di mio marito e di suo fratello furono rigettate perché “disertare il servizio militare sotto Saddam Hussein non era motivo di asilo sufficiente”. Gli diedero in ammissione provvisoria.

E adesso di nuovo, e ogni giorno. Capita continuamente è che il più delle volte non si viene a sapere. Penso invece che l’opinione pubblica dovrebbe essere informata di ogni singolo caso.

▻https://www.facebook.com/lisa.bosia/posts/10217444505928800

A #Roissy, l’escale de 25 Algériens vire à l’imbroglio administratif (février-mars 2021)

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/907729

Touriste bloquée dans la zone de transit de l’aéroport de Francfort par ce qu’elle n’a pas de visa (sa destination : USA) (26.07.2022)

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/968599

#Paris, la #ZAPI de l’aéroport #Charles_de_Gaulle:
“No man’s land at Paris airport: Where France keeps foreigners who’ve been refused entry”:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/732684
#France

Migrants bloqués à #Istanbul, #Turquie:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/457085
dont #Fadi_Mansour bloqué à Istanbul:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/471203

Père et fils bloqués à #Dubai:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/371015

Bloqués en #Corée_du_sud:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/506578

Bloqué à #Kuala_Lumpur, #Malaisie :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/720487

A #Malpensa, Milan, les effets du #Decreto_Salvini :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/740377#message740589

Novembre 2022: #Merhan_Karimi_Nasseri
Man who lived in Charles de Gaulle airport for 18 years dies in airport

►https://seenthis.net/messages/979619
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/980385

#film #Steven_Spielberger #The_terminal

Europe Benefits by Bankrolling an Anti-Migrant Effort. Niger Pays a Price.

Niger has been well paid for drastically reducing the number of African migrants using the country as a conduit to Europe. But the effort has hurt parts of the economy and raised security concerns.

The heavily armed troops are positioned around oases in Niger’s vast northern desert, where temperatures routinely climb beyond 100 degrees.

While both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have branches operating in the area, the mission of the government forces here is not to combat jihadism.

Instead, these Nigerien soldiers are battling human smugglers, who transport migrants across the harsh landscape, where hundreds of miles of dunes separate solitary trees.

The migrants are hoping to reach neighboring Libya, and from there, try a treacherous, often deadly crossing of the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

The toll of the military engagement is high. Some smugglers are armed, militants are rife and the terrain is unforgiving: Each mission, lasting two weeks, requires 50 new truck tires to replace the ones shredded in the blistering, rocky sand.

But the operation has had an impact: Niger has drastically reduced the number of people moving north to Libya through its territory over the past two years.

The country is being paid handsomely for its efforts, by a Europe eager to reduce the migrant flow. The European Union announced at the end of last year it would provide Niger with one billion euros, or about $1.16 billion, in development aid through 2020, with hundreds of millions of that earmarked for anti-migration projects. Germany, France and Italy also provide aid on their own.

It is part of a much broader European Union strategy to keep migrants from its shores, including paying billions of euros to Turkey and more than $100 million to aid agencies in Sudan.

Italy has been accused of paying off militias in Libya to keep migrants at bay. And here in Niger, some military officials angrily contend that France financed a former rebel leader who remains a threat, prioritizing its desire to stop migration over Niger’s national security interests.

Since passing a law against human trafficking in 2015, Niger has directed its military to arrest and jail migrant smugglers, confiscate their vehicles and bring the migrants they traffic to the police or the International Organization for Migration, or I.O.M. The migrants are then given a choice whether to continue on their journey — and risk being detained again, or worse — or given a free ride back to their home country.

The law’s effect has been significant. At the peak in 2015, there were 5,000 to 7,000 migrants a week traveling through Niger to Libya. The criminalization of smuggling has reduced those numbers to about 1,000 people a week now, according to I.O.M. figures.

At the same time, more migrants are leaving Libya, fleeing the rampant insecurity and racist violence targeting sub-Saharan Africans there.

As a result, the overall flow of people has now gone into a notable reverse: For the last two years, more African migrants have been leaving Libya to return to their homelands than entering the country from Niger, according to the I.O.M.

One of Niger’s biggest bus companies, Rimbo, used to send four migrant-filled buses each day from the country’s capital in the south, Niamey, to the northern city of Agadez, a jumping off point for the trip to the Libyan border.

Now, the company has signed a two-year contract with the I.O.M. to carry migrants the other way, so they can be repatriated.

On a recent breezy evening in Niamey, a convoy of four Rimbo buses rolled through the dusty streets after an arduous 20-hour drive from Agadez, carrying 400 migrants. They were headed back home to countries across West Africa, including Guinea, Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

For leaders in Europe, this change in migrant flows is welcome news, and a testament to Niger’s dedication to shared goals.

“Niger really became one of our best allies in the region,” said Raul Mateus Paula, the bloc’s ambassador to Niger.

But the country’s achievement has also come with considerable costs, including on those migrants still determined to make it to Libya, who take more risks than ever before. Drivers now take routes hundreds of miles away from water points and go through mined areas to avoid military patrols. When smugglers learn the military is in the area, they often abandon migrants in the desert to escape arrest.

This has led to dozens of deaths by dehydration over the past two years, prompting Niger’s civil protection agency and the I.O.M. to launch weekly rescue patrols.

The agency’s head, Adam Kamassi, said his team usually rescues between 20 to 50 people every time it goes out. On those trips, it nearly always finds three or four bodies.

The crackdown on human smuggling has also been accompanied by economic decline and security concerns for Niger.

The government’s closure of migrant routes has caused an increase in unemployment and an uptick in other criminal activity like drug smuggling and robbery, according to a Niger military intelligence document.

“I know of about 20 people who have become bandits for lack of work,” said Mahamadou Issouf, who has been driving migrants from Agadez to southern Libya since 2005, but who no longer has work.

Earlier this year, the army caught him driving 31 migrants near a spot in the desert called the Puit d’Espoir, or Well of Hope. While the army released him in this case, drivers who worked for him have been imprisoned and two of his trucks impounded.

The military intelligence document also noted that since the crackdown, towns along the migrant route are having a hard time paying for essential services like schools and health clinics, which had relied on money from migration and the industries feeding it.

For example, the health clinic in Dirkou, once a major migrant way station in northern Niger, now has fewer paying clients because the number of migrants seeking has dwindled. Store owners who relied on the steady flow of people traveling through have gone bankrupt.

Hassan Mohammed is another former migrant smuggler who lost his livelihood in the crackdown.

A native of Dirkou, Mr. Mohammed, 31, began driving migrants across the desert in 2002, earning enough in the process to buy two Toyota pickup trucks. The smuggling operation grew enough that he began employing his younger brothers to drive.

Today, Mr. Mohammed’s brothers are in prison, serving the six-month sentences convicted smuggler drivers face. His two pickup trucks are gathering dust, along with a few dozen other confiscated vehicles, on a Niger army base. With no income, Mr. Mohammed now relies on the generosity of friends to survive.

With Europe as a primary beneficiary of the smuggling crackdown, the European Union is eager to keep the effort in place, and some of the bloc’s aid finances a project to convert former smugglers into entrepreneurs. But the project is still in its pilot stage more than two years after the migrant crackdown began.

Ibrahim Yacouba, the former foreign minister of Niger, who resigned earlier this year, said, “There are lots of announcements of millions of euros in funding, but in the lived reality of those who are in the industry, there has been no change.”

The crackdown has also raised security concerns, as France has taken additional steps to stop migration along the Niger-Libya border that go beyond its asylum-processing center.

From its military base in the northern Nigerien outpost of Madama, France funded last year an ethnic Toubou militia in southern Libya, with the goal of using the group to help stop smugglers, according to Nigerien security officials.

This rankled the Nigerien military because the militia is headed by an ex-Nigerien rebel, Barka Sidimi, who is considered a major security risk by the country’s officials. To military leaders, this was an example of a European anti-migrant policy taking precedent over Niger’s own security.

A French military spokesperson said, “We don’t have information about the collaboration you speak of.”

Despite the country’s progress in reducing the flow of migrants, Nigerien officials know the problem of human smugglers using the country as a conduit is not going away.

“The fight against clandestine migration is not winnable,’’ said Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s interior minister.

Even as Libya has experienced a net drop in migrants, new routes have opened up: More migrants are now entering Algeria and transiting to Morocco to attempt a Mediterranean crossing there, according to Giuseppe Loprete, who recently left his post after being the I.O.M.’s director in Niger for four years.

But despite the drawbacks that come with it, the smuggling crackdown will continue, at least for now, according to Mr. Bazoum, the interior minister. Migrant smuggling and trafficking, he said, “creates a context of a criminal economy, and we are against all forms of economic crime to preserve the stability and security of our country.”

For Mr. Mohammed, the former smuggler, the crackdown has left him idle and dejected, with no employment prospects.

“There’s no project for any of us here,” he said. “There’s nothing going on. I only sleep and wake up.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/08/26/world/africa/26niger4/Niger-slide-MLG8-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg

Le 25 Octobre 2018, le Chef de Mission de l’ OIM Niger, M. Martin Wyss, a remis à la Police Nationale-Niger ??️via son Directeur Général Adjoint, M. Oumarou Moussa, le premier prototype du poste frontière mobile, en présence du #Directeur_de_la_Surveillance_du_Territoire (#DST) des partenaires techniques et financiers.

Ce camion aménagé avec deux bureaux et une salle d’attente, des climatiseurs et une connectivité satellitaire, est autonome en électricité grâce à des panneaux solaires amovibles et une turbine éolienne. Il aura pour fonction d’appuyer des postes de contrôle aux frontières, établir un poste frontalier temporaire ou venir en soutien de mouvements massifs de personnes à travers les frontières.

Ce prototype unique au monde a été entièrement développé et conceptualisé par l’unité de #gestion_des_frontières de l’#OIM_Niger, pour l’adapter au mieux aux contraintes atmosphériques et topographiques du Niger.

Il a été financé par le Canada’s International Development – Global Affairs Canada ??️

https://i.imgur.com/fUnBhDe.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XfcPsVI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MVRFDHK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yhesACy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/8eysGnp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yEnBQAX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5cYBENp.jpg

Crédits photos : OIM Niger / Daniel Kouawo

source : ▻https://www.facebook.com/IBMNiger/posts/1230027903804111

#OIM #IOM #frontière_mobile #Canada

Remise du système MIDAS et inauguration du parc de vaccination à Makalondi

L’ OIM Niger a procédé à la remise du #système_MIDAS au niveau du poste de police de #Makalondi (Burkina Faso - Niger).

MIDAS saisit automatiquement les informations biographiques et biométriques des voyageurs à partir de lecteurs de documents, d’#empreintes_digitales et de #webcams. Il est la propriété entière et souveraine du Gouvernement du Niger.

Le sytème permet d’enregistrer pour mieux sécuriser et filtrer les individus mal intentionnés, mais aussi de mieux connaître les flux pour ensuite adapter les politiques de développement sur les axes d’échange.

A la même occasion, le Gouverneur de Tillabéri et l’OIM ont inauguré un par de vaccination le long d’un couloir de transhumance de la CEDEAO.

Ce projet a été réalisé grâce au don du peuple Japonais.

▻https://www.facebook.com/IBMNiger/videos/483536085494618
#surveillance #biométrie #MIDAS

Le mardi 28 aout 2018, s’est tenu la cérémonie de remise du système MIDAS au poste de police frontalier de Makalondi (frontière Burkina faso). Cette cérémonie organisée par l’OIM Niger dans le cadre du projet « #NICOLE – Renforcement de la coopération interservices pour la sécurité des frontières au Niger » sous financement du Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan a enregistré la remarquable participation du gouverneur de la région de Tillabéri, le directeur de la surveillance du Territoire (DST), les responsables régionaux, départementaux et communaux de la police Nationale et de l’élevage, les autorités locales et coutumières du département de #Torodi et de la commune rurale de #Makalondi ainsi que de l’#Eucap_Sahel_Niger. MIDAS (#Migration_Information_and_Data_Analysis_System) qui est un système d’information et de gestion des données migratoires développé par l’OIM en 2009 et opérationnel dans 19 pays est aujourd’hui également opérationnel au niveau du poste frontière de Makalondi. Cette cérémonie était aussi l’occasion d’inaugurer le parc de vaccination pour bétail réalisé dans le cadre du même projet par l’OIM afin de soutenir les capacités de résilience des communautés frontalières de la localité.
toutes les autorités présentes à la cérémonie ont tenues à exprimer leur immense gratitute envers l’OIM pour son appui au gouvernement du Niger dans son combat pour la sécurisation des frontières.

https://i.imgur.com/XVLUm57.jpg https://i.imgur.com/351JUTd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RflUQtp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XqmIULA.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HS39lIr.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TmW0CKJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/x0uFTLa.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hbuRC5w.jpg

Information reçu d’une chercheuse qui est sur le terrain au Niger, regardez le CV du nouveau chef IOM Niger...

https://i.imgur.com/Cm58gBw.png

Niger grapples with migration and its porous borders

Europe has been grappling with the migration problem on its side of the Mediterranean for several years now with little sign of bringing the situation under control, but there is also an African frontline, on the edges of the Sahara, and the improverished nation of Niger is one of the hotspots. The situation here is similarly out of control, and EU funds have been made available to try and persude people smugglers to give up their business. However, much of the money has gone to waste, and the situation has in some ways evolved into something worse. Euronews’ Valerie Gauriat has just returned from Niger. This is her report.

Scores of four-wheel drives have just arrived from Libya, at the checkpoint of the city of Agadez, in central Niger, Western Africa’s gateway to the Sahara.

Every week, convoys like these travel both ways, crossing the thousand kilometers of desert that separate the two countries.

Travelers are exhausted after a 5-day journey.

Many are Nigerian workers, fleeing renewed violence in Libya, but many others are migrants from other western African countries.

“When we get to Libya, they lock us up. And when we work we don’t get paid,” said one Senegalese man.

“What happened, we can’t describe it. We can’t talk about everything that goes on, because it’s bad, it’s so bad !” said another, from Burkina Fasso.

Many have already tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

“We paid for it, but we never went. They caught us and locked us up. I want to go home to Senegal now, that’s my hope,” said another man.

Mohamed Tchiba organised this convoy. This former Touareg rebel is a well-known figure in Agadez’s migration business, which is a long-standing, flourishing activity despite a law against irregular migration which made it illegal two years ago.

EU-funded reconversion projects were launched to offset the losses, but Mohamed refuses to give up his livelihood.

“I’m a smuggler, even now I’m a smuggler! Because I’ve heard that in town they are giving us something to give up this job. But they did not give me anything. And I do not know any other work than this one,” he told us.

We head to Agadez, where we find dozens of vehicles in a car park. They were confiscated from the smugglers who were arrested by the police, and are a slowly-rusting symbol of the fight against irregular immigration.

But that didn’t go down well with the local population. The law hit the local economy hard

Travelers departing for Libya were once Ibrahim’s main source of revenue, but now customers for his water cans are scarce. The layoffs of workers after the closure of gold mines in the area did not help.

“Before, we sold 400 to 500 water cans every week to migrants, and cans were also sent to the mine. But they closed the road to Libya, they closed the mines, everything is closed. And these young people stay here without working or doing anything, without food. If they get up in the morning, and they go to bed at night, without eating anything, what will prevent them one day from going to steal something?” wonders trader Oumarou Chehou.

Friday prayers are one of the few occasions when the city comes to life.

We go to meet with the President of the so-called Association for former migration workers.

He takes us to meet one of the former smugglers. After stopping their activity they have benefited from an EU-funded reconversion programme.

Abdouramane Ghali received a stock of chairs, pots, and loudspeakers, which he rents out for celebrations. We ask him how business is going.

"It depends on God ... I used to make much more money before; I could get up to 800 euros a week; now it’s barely 30 euros a week,” he says.

Abdouramane is still among the luckiest. Out of 7000 people involved in the migration business, less than 400 have so far benefited from the reconversion package: about 2000 euros per project. That’s not enough to get by, says the president of the Former Smugglers’ Association, Bachir Amma.

“We respected the law, we are no longer working, we stopped, and now it’s the State of Niger and the European Union which abandoned us. People are here, they have families, they have children, and they have nothing. We eat with our savings. The money we made before, that’s what feeds us now, you see. It’s really difficult, it’s very hard for us,” he says.

We catch up with Abdouramane the next morning. He has just delivered his equipment to one of his customers, Abba Seidou, also a former smuggler, who is now a taxi driver. Abba is celebrating the birth of his first child, a rare opportunity to forget his worries.

“Since it’s a very wonderful day, it strengthened my heart, to go and get chairs, so that people, even if there is nothing, they can sit down if they come to your house. The times are hard for immigration, now; but with the small funds we get, people can get by. It’s going to be okay,” the proud father says. Lots of other children gather round.

“These kids are called the” talibe “, or street kids,” reports euronews’ Valerie Gauriat. "And the celebration is a chance for them to get some food. Since the anti-smuggling law was implemented, there are more and more of them in the streets of Agadez.”

The European Union has committed to spending more than one billion euros on development aid in a country classified as one of the poorest in the world. Niger is also one of the main beneficiaries of the European emergency fund created in 2015 to address migration issues in Africa. But for the vice-president of the region of Agadez, these funds were only a bargaining chip for the law against irregular immigration, which in his eyes, only serves the interests of Europe.

Valerie Gauriat:

“Niger has received significant funding from the European Union. Do you believe these funds are not used properly?”

Vice-President of the Agadez Regional Council, Aklou Sidi Sidi:

“First of all the funding is insufficient. When we look at it, Turkey has received huge amounts of money, a lot more than Niger. And even armed groups in Libya received much more money than Niger. Today, we are sitting here, we are the abyss of asylum seekers, refugees, migrants, displaced people. Agadez is an abyss,” he sighs.

In the heart of the Sahel region, Niger is home to some 300,000 displaced people and refugees. They are a less and less transitory presence, which weighs on the region of Agadez. One center managed by the International Office for Migration hosts migrants who have agreed to return to their countries of origin. But the procedures sometimes take months, and the center is saturated.

“80 percent of the migrants do not have any identification, they do not have any documents. That means that after registration we have to go through the procedure of the travel authorisation, and we have to coordinate this with the embassies and consulates of each country. That is the main issue and the challenge that we are facing every day. We have around 1000 people in this area, an area that’s supposed to receive 400 or 500 people. We have mattresses piled up because people sleep outside here because we’re over our capacity. Many people are waiting on the other side. So we need to move these people as quickly as possible so we can let others come,” says the IOM’s transit centre manager, Lincoln Gaingar.

Returning to their country is not an option for many who transit through Niger. Among them are several hundred Sudanese, supervised by the UNHCR. Many fled the Darfur conflict, and endured hell in Libyan detention centres. Some have been waiting for months for an answer to their asylum request.

Badererdeen Abdul Kareem dreams of completing his veterinary studies in the West.

“Since I finished my university life I lost almost half of my life because of the wars, traveling from Sudan to Libya. I don’t want to lose my life again. So it’s time to start my life, it’s time to work, it’s time to educate. Staying in Niger for nothing or staying in Niger for a long time, for me it’s not good.”

But the only short-term perspective for these men is to escape the promiscuity of the reception center. Faced with the influx of asylum seekers, the UNHCR has opened another site outside the city.

We meet Ibrahim Abulaye, also Sudanese, who spent years in refugee camps in Chad, and then Libya. He is 20 years old.

“It was really very difficult, but thank God I’m alive. What I can really say is that since we cannot go back home, we are looking for a place that is more favourable to us, where we can be safe, and have a better chance in life.”

Hope for a better life is closer for those who have been evacuated from Libyan prisons as part of an emergency rescue plan launched last year by the UNHCR. Welcomed in Niamey, the capital of Niger, they must be resettled in third countries.

After fleeing their country, Somalia, these women were tortured in Libyan detention centers. They are waiting for resettlement in France.

“There are many problems in my country, and I had my own. I have severe stomach injuries. The only reason I left my country was to escape from these problems, and find a safe place where I could find hope. People like me need hope,” said one of them.

A dozen countries, most of them European, have pledged to welcome some 2,600 refugees evacuated from Libya to Niger. But less than 400 have so far been resettled.

“The solidarity is there. There has to be a sense of urgency also to reinstall them, to welcome them in the countries that have been offering these places. It is important to avoid a long stay in Niger, and that they continue their journey onwards,” says the UNHCR’s Alessandra Morelli in Niamey.

The slowness of the countries offering asylum to respect their commitments has disappointed the Niger government. But what Niger’s Interior minister Mohamed Bazoum most regrets is a lack of foresight in Europe, when it comes to stemming irregular immigration.

“I am rather in favor of more control, but I am especially in favor of seeing European countries working together to promote another relationship with African countries. A relationship based on issuing visas on the basis of the needs that can be expressed by companies. It is because this work is not done properly, that we have finally accepted that the only possible migration is illegal migration,” he complains.

Estimated from 5 to 7,000 per week in 2015, the number of migrants leaving for Libya has fallen tenfold, according to the Niger authorities. But the traficking continues, on increasingly dangerous routes.

The desert, it is said in Agadez, has become more deadly than the Mediterranean.

We meet another one of the smugglers who for lack of alternatives says he has resumed his activities, even if he faces years in prison.

“This law is as if we had been gathered together and had knives put under our throats, to slit our throats. Some of us were locked up, others fled the country, others lost everything,” he says.

He takes us to one of the former transit areas where migrants were gathered before leaving for Libya, when it was allowed. The building has since been destroyed. Customers are rarer, and the price of crossings has tripled. In addition to the risk of being stopped by the police and army patrols, travelers have to dodge attacks by arms and drug traffickers who roam the desert.

“Often the military are on a mission, they don’t want to waste time, so sometimes they will tell you,’we can find an arrangement, what do you offer?’ We give them money to leave. We must also avoid bandits. There are armed people everywhere in the bush. We have to take byways to get around them. We know that it’s dangerous. But for us, the most dangerous thing is not to be able to feed your family! That’s the biggest danger!”

We entered one of the so-called ghettos outside Agadez, where candidates for the trip to Europe through Libya hide out, until smugglers pick them up. We are led to a house where a group of young people are waiting for their trip to be organized by their smuggler.

They have all have already tried to cross the desert, but were abandoned by their drivers, fleeing army patrols, and were saved in the nick of time. Several of their fellow travelers died of thirst and exhaustion.

Mohamed Balde is an asylum seeker from Guinea.

“The desert is a huge risk. There are many who have died, but people are not discouraged. Why are they coming? One should just ask the question!” he says. “All the time, there are meetings between West African leaders and the leaders of the European Union, to give out money, so that the migrants don’t get through. We say that’s a crime. It is their interests that they serve, not the interests of our continent. To stop immigration, they should invest in Africa, in companies, so that young people can work.”

Drogba Sumaru is an asylum seeker from the Ivory Coast.

“It’s no use giving money to people, or putting soldiers in the desert, or removing all the boats on the Mediterranean, to stop immigration! It won’t help, I will keep going on. There are thousands of young people in Africa, ready to go, always. Because there is nothing. There is nothing to keep them in their countries. When they think of the suffering of their families, when they think that they have no future. They will always be ready, ready for anything. They will always be ready to risk their lives,” he concludes.

▻https://www.euronews.com/2018/10/26/niger-grapples-with-migration-and-its-porous-borders

Europe’s « Migrant Hunters »

The checkpoint on the way out of the Saharan town of Agadez in Niger is nothing more than a long metal chain that stretches across the road. On a Monday afternoon in March, a handful of pickup trucks and lorries loaded with migrants mostly from southern Niger waited quietly at the barrier to embark on the long journey up through the Ténéré desert. An overweight officer inspected the vehicles and then invited the drivers to show him their paperwork inside a somber-looking shack on the side of the road, where money most likely changed hands.

Every Monday afternoon a convoy, protected by an escort of three military pickups, two mounted with machine guns, begins its arduous journey toward Dirkou, 435 miles away, on the road to the Libyan border. Protection has long been needed against highwaymen—or, as they’re called locally, coupeurs de route. These disgruntled Tuareg youths and former rebels roam the foothills of the Aïr Mountains just beyond Agadez. If a vehicle slips out of view of the escort for even a moment, the coupeurs seize the opportunity, chasing and shooting at the overloaded vehicles to relieve the passengers of their money and phones—or sometimes even to take the cars. A cautious driver sticks close behind the soldiers, even if they are pitifully slow, stopping frequently to sleep, eat, drink tea, or extract bribes from drivers trying to avoid the checkpoints.

The first 60 miles out of Agadez—a journey of about two hours through the mountains—were the most hazardous. But then we reached the dusty Ténéré plain. As darkness fell, lighter vehicles picked up speed, making good headway during the night as the cold hardened the sand. Sleepy migrants, legs dangling over the side of the tailboard, held on to branches attached to the frame of the vehicle to keep from falling off.

The following day, there was a stop at Puits Espoir (“Hope’s Well”), midway between Agadez and Dirkou. It was dug 15 years ago to keep those whose transport had broken down in the desert from dying of thirst. But the well’s Arabic name, Bir Tawil, which means “the Deep Well,” is perhaps more apt. The well drops nearly 200 feet, and without a long enough rope to reach the water below, migrants and drivers can perish at its edge. The escort soldiers told me that the bodies of 11 who died in this way are buried in the sand inside a nearby enclosure built from car scraps. Travelers took a nap under its shade or beside the walls around the well, which were graffitied by those who had passed through. There was “Dec 2016 from Tanzania to Libya” or “Flavio—Solo from Guinea.” After Espoir, most vehicles abandon the slow convoy and go off on their own, risking attacks by coupeurs for a quicker journey toward Libya.

PROXY BORDER GUARDS

Before mid-2016, there were between 100 and 200 vehicles, mostly pickups, each filled with around 30 migrants heading for Libya, that were making such a journey every week. Since mid-2016, however, under pressure from the European Union, and with promises of financial support, the Niger government began cracking down on the northward flow of sub-Saharans, arresting drivers and confiscating cars, sometimes at the Agadez checkpoint itself. Now there are only a few cars transporting passengers, most of them Nigeriens who have managed to convince soldiers at the checkpoint—often with the help of a bribe—that they do not intend to go all the way to Europe but will end their journey in Libya.

“To close Libya’s southern border is to close Europe’s southern border,” Marco Minniti, Italy’s interior minister, said in April at a meeting in Rome with representatives of three cross-border Saharan tribes, the Tubu, Awlad Suleiman Arabs, and Tuareg. The leaders agreed to form a border force to stop migrants entering Libya from traveling to Europe, reportedly at the demand of, and under the prospect of money from, the Italian government. All three communities are interested in resolving the deadly conflicts that have beset the country since the fall of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011 and hope Italy will compensate them monetarily for their casualties (in tribal conflicts, a payment is needed to end a fight) as well as fund reconstruction and development of neglected southern Libya. Italy, of course, is keen on halting the flow of migrants reaching its shores and sees these Saharan groups, which have the potential to intervene before migrants even get to Libya, as plausible proxies.

Some tribal leaders in southern Libya—mostly Tubu and Tuareg—look favorably on Italy’s and Europe’s overtures and suggested that the EU should cooperate directly with local militias to secure the border. But their tribes largely benefit from smuggling migrants, and they also made clear this business will not stop unless development aid and compensation for the smugglers is provided. “The EU wants to use us against migrants and terrorism,” a Tubu militia leader told me, off-the-record, on the side of a meeting in the European Parliament last year. “But we have our own problems. What alternative can we propose to our youth, who live off trafficking?”

With or without the EU, some of the newly armed groups in Libya are selling themselves as migrant hunters. “We arrested more than 18,000 migrants,” a militia chief told me, with a hauteur that reminded me of the anti-immigrant sentiment spreading across Europe. “We don’t want just to please the EU, we protect our youths and our territory!”

It seems rather reckless, however, in a largely stateless stretch of the Sahara, for Europe to empower militias as proxy border guards, some of whom are the very smugglers whose operations the EU is trying to thwart. The precedent in Sudan is not encouraging. Last year, Khartoum received funding from the EU that was intended to help it restrict outward migration. The best the government could do was redeploy at the Sudanese-Libyan border the notorious Rapid Support Forces, recruited among Darfur’s Janjaweed militias, which have wreaked havoc in the province since 2003. In due course, their leader, Brigadier General Dagalo, also known as “Hemeti,” claimed to have arrested 20,000 migrants and then threatened to reopen the border if the EU did not pay an additional sum. The EU had already given Sudan and Niger 140 million euros each in 2016. And the Libyan rival factions are catching on, understanding well that the migrant crisis gives them a chance to blackmail European leaders worried about the success of far-right anti-immigrant groups in their elections. In February, with elections looming in the Netherlands and France, the EU made a deal to keep migrants in Libya, on the model of its March 2016 agreement with Turkey, with the Tripoli-based, internationally recognized Government of National Accord, despite the fact it has little control over the country. In August, the GNA’s main rival, eastern Libya’s strongman Khalifa Haftar, claimed that blocking migrants at Libya’s southern borders would cost one billion euros a year over 20 years and asked France, his closest ally in Europe, to provide him with military equipment such as helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, and night vision goggles. Needless to say, Haftar did not get the equipment.

THE HUB

Dirkou became a migrant hub about 25 years ago and remains a thriving market town whose residents make a living mostly off of road transport to and from Libya. Smuggling people across Libya’s southern borders became semiofficial practice in 1992, as Qaddafi sought to circumvent the UN’s air traffic embargo. This, in turn, opened up an opportunity for ambitious facilitators who could get their hands on a vehicle, a period that came to be known locally as “the Marlboro era.” Planes and trucks, contravening the embargo, delivered cigarettes to Dirkou, where there was already an airstrip long enough for cargo planes. They then sold their contraband to Libyan smugglers, who took them north with help from Nigerien authorities.

Smuggling was possible at the time only if the government was involved, explained Bakri, one of the drivers I met in Dirkou (and who requested his name be changed). Gradually, cigarettes were replaced by Moroccan cannabis, which was driven down from around the Algerian border through Mali and Niger. Tuareg rebels, who had been involved in sporadic insurgencies against the governments of Mali and Niger, began to attack the convoys to steal their cargoes for reselling. The traffickers eventually enlisted them to serve as their protectors, guides, or drivers.

That process began in the 1990s and 2000s when the Niger government and Tuareg rebels held regular peace talks and struck deals that allowed former insurgents to be integrated into the Niger armed forces. Hundreds of fighters who were left to fend for themselves, however, fell back on banditry or drug trafficking, and it wasn’t long before the authorities decided that they should be encouraged to transport migrants to Libya instead. Many now own vehicles that had been captured from the army in the course of the rebellion. These were cleared through customs at half the normal fee, and the Ministry of Transport awarded a great number of them licenses. It was decided that the new fleet of migrant facilitators would take passengers at the bus station in Agadez.

In 2011, after the NATO-backed revolution in Libya had toppled Qaddafi, newly formed Tubu militias took control of most of the country’s arms stockpiles, as well as its southern borderlands. Many young Tubu men from Libya or Niger stole or, like Bakri, who dropped out of the university to become a smuggler, bought a good pickup truck for carrying passengers. The new wave of drivers who acquired their cars during the turmoil were known in Arabic as sawag NATO, or “NATO drivers.”

“If the number of migrants increased,” Bakri told me, “it’s mostly because NATO overthrew Qaddafi.” Qaddafi was able to regulate the flow of migrants into Europe and used it as a bargaining chip. In 2008, he signed a friendship treaty with Italy, which was then led by Silvio Berlusconi. In exchange for Libya’s help to block the migrants, “Il Cavaliere” launched the construction of a $5 billion highway in Libya. Crucially, however, Qaddafi’s regime provided paid work for hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharans, who had no need to cross the Mediterranean. Since 2011, Libya has become a much more dangerous place, especially for migrants. They are held and often tortured by smugglers on the pretext that they owe money and used for slave labor and prostitution until their families can pay off the debt.

In May 2015, under EU pressure, Niger adopted a law that made assistance to any foreigner illegal on the grounds that it constituted migrant trafficking. Critics noted that the legislation contradicts Niger’s membership in the visa-free ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), from which most migrants traveling between Niger and Libya hail (they numbered 400,000 in 2016). The law was not enforced until the middle of last year, when the police began arresting drivers and “coaxers”—the regional term for all intermediaries on the human-smuggling routes up through West Africa. They jailed about 100 of them and confiscated another 100 vehicles. Three months later, the EU congratulated itself for a spectacular drop in migrant flows from Niger to Libya. But the announcement was based on International Organization for Migration (IOM) data, which the UN agency has since acknowledged to be incorrect, owing to a “technical problem” with its database.

Saddiq, whose name has also been changed, is a coaxer in Agadez. He told me that migrants were still arriving in the town in the hope of heading north. “The police are from southern Niger and they are not familiar with the desert,” he said. “For every car arrested, 20 get through.” The cars have gotten faster. One of Saddiq’s drivers traded his old one for a Toyota Tundra, which can reach 120 miles per hour on hard sand. Meanwhile, groups of migrants have gotten smaller and are thus lighter loads. New “roads” have already been pounded out through the desert. Drivers pick up migrants as far south as the Nigerien-Nigerian border, keeping clear of towns and checkpoints. “Tubu drivers have been going up with GPS to open new roads along the Niger-Algeria border,” said Saddiq. “They meet the drug traffickers and exchange food and advice.”

On these new roads, risks are higher for drivers and passengers. Vehicles get lost, break down, and run out of fuel. Thirst is a constant danger, and, as drivers and the IOM warned, deaths increased during the 2017 dry season, which began in May. Drivers pursued by patrols are likely to aim for a high-speed getaway, which means abandoning their passengers in the desert. “Because we couldn’t take the main road, bandits attacked us,” Aji, a Gambian migrant, told me as he recounted his failed attempt to get to Libya last December. “Only 30 kilometers from Agadez, bandits shot at us, killed two drivers and injured 17 passengers, including myself.” They took everything he owned. He was brought back to the hospital in Agadez for treatment for his wounded leg. He was broke and his spirits were low. “I no longer want to go to Libya,” he said.

New liabilities for the smugglers drive up their prices: the fare for a ride from Agadez to Libya before the Niger government decided to curtail the northward flow was around $250. Now it is $500 or more. People with enough money travel in small, elite groups of three to five for up to $1,700 per head. Migrants without enough cash can travel on credit, but they risk falling into debt bondage once in Libya. Even with the higher fees, smugglers’ revenues have not increased. Saddiq’s has fallen from $5,000 a month to around $2,000. Costs, including lavish bribes to Niger’s security forces, have risen sharply. Still, the pace of the trade remains brisk. “I have a brand-new vehicle ready for 22 passengers,” Saddiq told me. That evening, as he loaded up his passengers with their light luggage and jerry cans of water, a motorbike went ahead of it with its headlights off to make sure that the coast was clear.

“Many won’t give up this work, but those who continue are stuntmen,” grumbled one of Saddiq’s colleagues, a Tuareg former rebel who has been driving migrants for more than 15 years. Feeling chased by the authorities, or forced to pay them bribes twice as much as before, Tuareg and Tubu drivers are increasingly angry with the Nigerien government and what they call “the diktat of Europe.” He thought there might be better money in other activities. “What should we do? Become terrorists?” he said, somewhat provocatively. “I should go up to Libya and enlist with Daesh [the Islamic State, or ISIS]. They’re the ones who offer the best pay.”

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH338/06dsc_1118jp08e3-1619e.jpg

►https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/niger/2017-08-31/europes-migrant-hunters
#Agadez #réfugiés #Niger #désert_du_Ténéré #passeurs #smugglers #smuggling #Dirkou #routes_migratoires #parcours_migratoires

Sfidare la morte per fuggire dal Niger

In Niger i militari inseguono i migranti. Ordini dall’alto: quello che vuole l’Europa. Che per questo li paga. I profughi cercano così altri percorsi. Passano per il deserto, per piste più pericolose. Con il rischio di morire disidratati

▻http://espresso.repubblica.it/polopoly_fs/1.308980!/httpImage/image.JPG_gen/derivatives/gallery_990/image.JPG
▻http://espresso.repubblica.it/polopoly_fs/1.308979!/httpImage/image.JPG_gen/derivatives/gallery_990/image.JPG

https://i.imgur.com/5MV19OZ.png

A line in the sand

In late 2016, Agadez made headlines when Niger became one of the European Union (EU)’s prime partners in the fight against irregular migration. The arrest of human smugglers and the confiscation of their 4x4 trucks resulted in a decrease in the number of migrants travelling through the region.

Given Agadez’s economic dependence on the migration industry, Clingendael’s Conflict Research Unit investigated the costs of these measures for the local population, their authorities and regional security. We invite you to work with our data and explore our findings.

https://i.imgur.com/kZPYDGu.png

Sur l’axe Niamey-Agadez, les bus transportant les candidats au rêve européen se vident

Quand l’Europe renvoie la crise migratoire de l’autre côté de la Méditerranée (2). Le pouvoir nigérien a durci ses contrôles d’identité afin d’enrayer le flux de migrants qui convergent au Niger pour rallier la Libye.

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2017/11/01/sur-l-axe-niamey-agadez-les-bus-transportant-les-candidats-au-reve-europeen-

Quel lunedì che ha cambiato la migrazione in Niger

Nella prima storia della sua trilogia sul Niger per Open Migration, Giacomo Zandonini ci raccontava com’è cambiata la vita di un ex passeur di migranti dopo l’applicazione delle misure restrittive da parte del governo. In questa seconda storia, sfida i pericoli del Sahara insieme ai migranti e racconta come la chiusura della rotta di Agadez abbia spinto la locale economia al dettaglio verso le mani di un sistema mafioso.

▻http://openmigration.org/analisi/quel-lunedi-che-ha-cambiato-la-migrazione-in-niger
#fermeture_des_frontières #mafia

En anglais:
▻http://openmigration.org/en/analyses/the-monday-that-changed-migration-in-niger

In Niger, Europe’s Empty Promises Hinder Efforts to Move Beyond Smuggling

The story of one former desert driver and his struggle to escape the migration trade reveals the limits of an E.U. scheme to offer alternatives to the Sahara smugglers. Giacomo Zandonini reports from Agadez.

https://newsdeeply.imgix.net/20171228111958/Issa-Tahir-left-Kore-Yesko-right-and-a_.jpg?w=640&fit=max&q=60&dpr=2#.jpg

In Niger’s desert, Europe’s migration crackdown pinches wallets

“We worry for the people who used to provide services to the migrants. Now they’ve been put in a risky situation too.”

▻http://news.trust.org/item/20180327003253-3wunx

Agadez, aux portes du Sahara

Dans la foulée de la ’crise des migrants’ de 2015, l’Union Européenne a signé une série d’accords avec des pays tiers. Parmi ceux-ci, un deal avec le Niger qui provoque des morts anonymes par centaines dans le désert du Sahara. Médecins du Monde est présente à Agadez pour soigner les migrants. Récit.

▻https://spark.adobe.com/page/47HkbWVoG4nif

« A Agadez, on est passé de 350 migrants par jour à 100 par semaine »

Journée spéciale sur RFI ce 23 mai. La radio mondiale propose des reportages et des interviews sur Agadez, la grande ville-carrefour du Nord-Niger, qui tente de tourner le dos à l’émigration clandestine. Notre reporter, Bineta Diagne essaie notamment de savoir si les quelque 5 000 à 6 000 passeurs, transporteurs et rabatteurs, qui vivent du trafic des migrants, sont en mesure de se reconvertir. Au Niger, Mohamed Bazoum est ministre d’Etat, ministre de l’Intérieur et de la Sécurité publique. En ligne de Niamey, il répond aux questions de Christophe Boisbouvier.

▻http://www.rfi.fr/emission/20180523-agadez-on-est-passe-350-migrants-jour-100-semaine

Des contacts sur place ont confirmé à Karine Gatelier (Modus Operandi, association grenobloise) et moi-même que les arrivées à Agadez baissent.
La question reste :

Les itinéraires changent : vers où ?

Niger: la difficile #reconversion d’Agadez

Le Niger est un pays de transit et de départ de l’émigration irrégulière vers l’Europe. Depuis fin 2016, les autorités tentent de lutter contre ce phénomène. Les efforts des autorités se concentrent autour de la ville d’Agadez, dans le centre du pays. Située aux portes du désert du Ténéré et classée patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco, Agadez a, pendant plusieurs années, attiré énormément de touristes amoureux du désert. Mais l’insécurité a changé la donne de cette région, qui s’est progressivement développée autour d’une économie parallèle reposant sur la migration. Aujourd’hui encore, les habitants cherchent de nouveaux débouchés.

▻http://www.rfi.fr/afrique/20180523-niger-difficile-reconversion-agadez
#tourisme

Au #Sahara, voyager devient un crime

La France s’est émue lorsque Mamadou Gassama, un Malien de 22 ans, sans papiers, a sauvé un enfant de 4 ans d’une (probable) chute fatale à Paris. Une figure de « migrant extraordinaire » comme les médias savent régulièrement en créer, mais une figure qui ne devrait pas faire oublier tous les autres, « les statistiques, les sans-nom, les numéros. » Ni tous celles et ceux qui n’ont aucune intention de venir en Europe, mais qui sont néanmoins victimes des nouvelles politiques migratoires européennes et africaines mises en œuvre à l’abri des regards, à l’intérieur même du continent africain.

Les migrations vers et à travers le Sahara ne constituent certes pas un phénomène nouveau. Mais à partir du début des années 2000, la focalisation des médias et des pouvoirs publics sur la seule minorité d’individus qui, après avoir traversé le Sahara, traversent également la Méditerranée, a favorisé l’assimilation de l’ensemble de ces circulations intra-africaines à des migrations économiques à destination de l’Europe.

Ce point de vue, qui repose sur des représentations partielles et partiales des faits, éloignées des réalités de terrain observées par les chercheurs, sert depuis lors de base de légitimation à la mise en œuvre de politiques migratoires restrictives en Afrique.

Le Sahara, zone de contrôle

L’Europe (Union européenne et certains États), des organisations internationales (notamment l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM)) et des structures ad hoc (#Frontex, #EUCAP_Sahel_Niger), avec la coopération plus ou moins volontariste des autorités nationales des pays concernés, participent ainsi au durcissement législatif mis en place dans les pays du Maghreb au cours des années 2000, puis en Afrique de l’Ouest la décennie suivante, ainsi qu’au renforcement de la surveillance et du contrôle des espaces désertiques et des populations mobiles.

Le Sahara est ainsi transformé en une vaste « #zone-frontière » où les migrants peuvent partout et en permanence être contrôlés, catégorisés, triés, incités à faire demi-tour voire être arrêtés.

Cette nouvelle manière de « gérer » les #circulations_migratoires dans la région pose de nombreux problèmes, y compris juridiques. Ainsi, les ressortissants des États membres de la Communauté économique des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (#CEDEAO), qui ont officiellement le droit de circuler librement au sein de l’#espace_communautaire, se font régulièrement arrêter lorsqu’ils se dirigent vers les frontières septentrionales du #Mali ou du #Niger.

Le Niger, nouveau garde-frontière de l’Europe

Dans ce pays, les migrations internationales n’étaient jusqu’à récemment pas considérées comme un problème à résoudre et ne faisaient pas l’objet d’une politique spécifique.

Ces dernières années, tandis que le directeur général de l’OIM affirmait – sans chiffre à l’appui – qu’il y a dorénavant autant de décès de migrants au Sahara qu’en Méditerranée, l’UE continuait de mettre le gouvernement nigérien sous pression pour en finir avec « le modèle économique des passeurs ».

Si des projets et programmes sont, depuis des années, mis en œuvre dans le pays pour y parvenir, les moyens financiers et matériels dédiés ont récemment été décuplés, à l’instar de l’ensemble des moyens destinés à lutter contre les migrations irrégulières supposées être à destination de l’Europe.

Ainsi, le budget annuel de l’OIM a été multiplié par 7,5 en 20 ans (passant de 240 millions d’euros en 1998 à 1,8 milliard d’euros en 2018), celui de Frontex par 45 en 12 ans (passant de 6 millions d’euros en 2005 à 281 millions d’euros en 2017), celui d’EUCAP Sahel Niger par 2,5 en 5 ans (passant de moins de 10 millions d’euros en 2012 à 26 millions d’euros en 2017), tandis que depuis 2015 le Fonds fiduciaire d’urgence pour l’Afrique a été lancé par l’UE avec un budget de 2,5 milliards d’euros destinés à lutter contre les « causes profondes de la migration irrégulière » sur le continent, et notamment au Sahel.

Ceci est particulièrement visible dans la région d’Agadez, dans le nord du pays, qui est plus que jamais considérée par les experts européens comme « le lieu où passe la plupart des flux de [migrants irréguliers] qui vont en Libye puis en Europe par la route de la Méditerranée centrale ».

La migration criminalisée

La mission européenne EUCAP Sahel Niger, lancée en 2012 et qui a ouvert une antenne permanente à Agadez en 2017, apparaît comme un des outils clés de la politique migratoire et sécuritaire européenne dans ce pays. Cette mission vise à « assister les autorités nigériennes locales et nationales, ainsi que les forces de sécurité, dans le développement de politiques, de techniques et de procédures permettant d’améliorer le contrôle et la lutte contre les migrations irrégulières », et d’articuler cela avec la « lutte anti-terroriste » et contre « les activités criminelles associées ».

Outre cette imbrication officialisée des préoccupations migratoires et sécuritaires, EUCAP Sahel Niger et le nouveau Cadre de partenariat pour les migrations, mis en place par l’UE en juin 2016 en collaboration avec le gouvernement nigérien, visent directement à mettre en application la loi nigérienne n°2015-36 de mai 2015 sur le trafic de migrants, elle-même faite sur mesure pour s’accorder aux attentes européennes en la matière.

Cette loi, qui vise à « prévenir et combattre le trafic illicite de migrants » dans le pays, définit comme trafiquant de migrants « toute personne qui, intentionnellement et pour en tirer, directement ou indirectement, un avantage financier ou un autre avantage matériel, assure l’entrée ou la sortie illégale au Niger » d’un ressortissant étranger.
Jusqu’à 45 000 euros d’amende et 30 ans de prison

Dans la région d’#Agadez frontalière de la Libye et de l’Algérie, les gens qui organisent les transports des passagers, tels les chauffeurs-guides en possession de véhicules pick-up tout-terrain leur permettant de transporter une trentaine de voyageurs, sont dorénavant accusés de participer à un « trafic illicite de migrants », et peuvent être arrêtés et condamnés.

Transporter ou même simplement loger, dans le nord du Niger, des ressortissants étrangers (en situation irrégulière ou non) fait ainsi encourir des amendes allant jusqu’à 30 millions de francs CFA (45 000 euros) et des peines pouvant s’élever à 30 ans de prison.

Et, cerise sur le gâteau de la répression aveugle, il est précisé que « la tentative des infractions prévue par la présente loi est punie des mêmes peines. » Nul besoin donc de franchir irrégulièrement une frontière internationale pour être incriminé.

Résultat, à plusieurs centaines de kilomètres des frontières, des transporteurs, « passeurs » avérés ou supposés, requalifiés en « trafiquants », jugés sur leurs intentions et non leurs actes, peuvent dorénavant être arrêtés. Pour les autorités nationales, comme pour leurs homologues européens, il s’agit ainsi d’organiser le plus efficacement possible une lutte préventive contre « l’émigration irrégulière » à destination de l’Europe.

Cette aberration juridique permet d’arrêter et de condamner des individus dans leur propre pays sur la seule base d’intentions supposées : c’est-à-dire sans qu’aucune infraction n’ait été commise, sur la simple supposition de l’intention d’entrer illégalement dans un autre pays.

Cette mesure a été prise au mépris de la Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples (article 12.2) et de la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme (article 13.2), qui stipulent que « toute personne a le droit de quitter tout pays, y compris le sien ».

Au mépris également du principe de présomption d’innocence, fondateur de tous les grands systèmes légaux. En somme, une suspension du droit et de la morale qui reflète toute la violence inique des logiques de lutte contre les migrations africaines supposées être à destination de l’Europe.
Des « passeurs » sans « passages »

La présomption de culpabilité a ainsi permis de nombreuses arrestations suivies de peines d’emprisonnement, particulièrement dans la région d’Agadez, perçue comme une région de transit pour celles et ceux qui souhaitent se rendre en Europe, tandis que les migrations vers le Sud ne font l’objet d’aucun contrôle de ce type.

La loi de 2015 permet en effet aux forces de l’ordre et de sécurité du Niger d’arrêter des chauffeurs nigériens à l’intérieur même de leur pays, y compris lorsque leurs passagers sont en situation régulière au Niger. Cette loi a permis de créer juridiquement la catégorie de « passeur » sans qu’il y ait nécessairement passage de frontière.

La question des migrations vers et à travers le Sahara semble ainsi dorénavant traitée par le gouvernement nigérien, et par ses partenaires internationaux, à travers des dispositifs dérivés du droit de la guerre, et particulièrement de la « guerre contre le terrorisme » et de l’institutionnalisation de lois d’exception qui va avec.

Malgré cela, si le Niger est peu à peu devenu un pays cobaye des politiques antimigrations de l’Union européenne, nul doute pour autant qu’aucune police n’est en mesure d’empêcher totalement les gens de circuler, si ce n’est localement et temporairement – certainement pas dans la durée et à l’échelle du Sahara.

https://images.theconversation.com/files/220994/original/file-20180530-120505-1xr5c0y.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip#.jpg

Adapter le voyage

Migrants et transporteurs s’adaptent et contournent désormais les principales villes et leurs #check-points, entraînant une hausse des tarifs de transport entre le Niger et l’Afrique du Nord. Ces #tarifs, qui ont toujours fortement varié selon les véhicules, les destinations et les périodes, sont passés d’environ 100 000 francs CFA (150 euros) en moyenne par personne vers 2010, à plusieurs centaines de milliers de francs CFA en 2017 (parfois plus de 500 euros). Les voyages à travers le Sahara sont ainsi plus onéreux et plus discrets, mais aussi plus difficiles et plus risqués qu’auparavant, car en prenant des routes inhabituelles, moins fréquentées, les transporteurs ne minimisent pas seulement les risques de se faire arrêter, mais aussi ceux de se faire secourir en cas de pannes ou d’attaques par des bandits.

Comme le montre l’article Manufacturing Smugglers : From Irregular to Clandestine Mobility in the Sahara, cette « clandestinisation » (►http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716217744529) généralisée du transport de migrants s’accompagne d’une diminution, voire d’une disparition, du contrôle social jusque-là exercé sur les différents acteurs, entre eux, mais aussi par leurs proches ou par les agents de l’État qui ponctionnaient illégalement leurs activités.

Il était en effet aisé, jusqu’à récemment, de savoir qui était parti d’où, quel jour, avec combien de passagers, et de savoir si tous étaient arrivés à bon port. Ce qui incitait chacun à rester dans les limites morales de l’acceptable. Ces dernières années, entre les risques pris volontairement par les transporteurs et les migrants, et les abandons de passagers dans le désert, il ne serait pas étonnant que le nombre de morts sur les pistes sahariennes ait augmenté.
Une vraie fausse réduction des flux

Récemment, l’OIM a pu clamer une diminution des volumes des flux migratoires passant par le Niger, et des représentants de l’UE et de gouvernements sur les deux continents ont pu se féliciter de l’efficacité des mesures mises en œuvre, clamant unanimement la nécessité de poursuivre leur effort.

Mais de l’accord même des agents de l’#OIM, seul organisme à produire des chiffres en la matière au Sahara, il ne s’agit en fait que d’une diminution du nombre de personnes passant par ses points de contrôle, ce qui ne nous dit finalement rien sur le volume global des flux à travers le pays. Or, malgré toutes les mesures sécuritaires mises en place, la toute petite partie de la population qui a décidé de voyager ainsi va sans doute continuer à le faire, quel qu’en soit le risque.

▻https://theconversation.com/au-sahara-voyager-devient-un-crime-96825
#Afrique_de_l'Ouest #mobilité #libre_circulation #frontières #externalisation #fermeture_des_frontières #migrations #asile #réfugiés #IOM #contrôles_frontaliers #déstructuration #passeurs #smugglers

New terrorist threat as EU stance on migrants triggers disquiet in Niger

Efforts to buttress Europe’s borders have left people smugglers in Niger jobless and ripe for exploitation by jihadist groups

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/37c129332b07d84017630f3436568d5216ce6d7c/0_384_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?w=620&q=20&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&dpr=2&s=395daad4068428fb906254a740a9194f#.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Eak9zQF.jpg

Thank you to the new EU Ambassador to #Niger @DenisaIonete for visiting IOM’s transit centre for #migrants in #Agadez last week. @europeaid @IOMatEU @dueniger #AfricaTrustFund

▻https://twitter.com/OIM_Niger/status/1054298154714259457/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.euron

Déclaration de fin de mission du Rapporteur Spécial des Nations Unies sur les droits de l’homme des migrants, Felipe González Morales, lors de sa visite au Niger (1-8 octobre, 2018)

L’externalisation de la gestion de la migration du Niger par le biais de l’OIM

En raison de ses capacités limitées, le gouvernement du Niger s’appuie depuis 2014 largement sur l’OIM pour répondre à la situation des personnes migrantes expulsées de l’Algérie ou forcées de revenir de pays voisins tels que la Libye et le Mali. À leur arrivée dans l’un des six centres de transit de l’OIM, et sous réserve qu’ils s’engagent à leur retour, l’OIM leur offre un abri, de la nourriture, une assistance médicale et psychosociale, des documents de voyage/d’identité et le transport vers leur pays d’origine. Depuis 2015, 11 936 migrants ont été rapatriés dans leur pays d’origine dans le cadre du programme d’AVR de l’OIM, la plupart en Guinée Conakry, au Mali et au Cameroun.

Au cours de ma visite, j’ai eu l’occasion de m’entretenir avec de nombreux hommes, femmes et enfants vivant dans les centres de transit de l’OIM à Agadez et à Niamey, inscrits au programme d’AVR. Certains d’entre eux ont indiqué qu’ils ne pouvaient plus supporter les violations des droits de l’homme (ayant été victimes de discrimination raciale, d’arrestations arbitraires, de torture, d’expulsion collective, d’exploitation sexuelle et par le travail pendant leur migration) et de la situation difficile dans les centres de transit et souhaitaient retourner dans leur pays d’origine. D’autres ont indiqué qu’ils s’étaient inscrits au programme d’AVR parce que c’était la seule assistance qui leur était offerte, et beaucoup d’entre eux m’ont dit que dès leur retour dans leur pays d’origine, ils essaieraient de migrer à nouveau.

En effet, quand le programme d’AVR est la seule option disponible pour ceux qui ont été expulsés ou forcés de rentrer, et qu’aucune autre alternative réelle n’est proposée à ceux qui ne veulent pas s’y inscrire, y compris ceux qui se trouvent dans une situation vulnérable et qui ont été victimes de multiples violations des droits de l’homme, des questions se posent quant à la véritable nature volontaire de ces retours si l’on considère l’ensemble du parcours qu’ils ont effectué. De plus, l’inscription à un programme d’AVR ne peut pas prévaloir sur le fait que la plupart de ces migrants sont à l’origine victimes d’expulsions illégales, en violation des principes fondamentaux du droit international.

L’absence d’évaluations individuelles efficaces et fondées sur les droits de l’homme menées auprès des migrants rapatriés, faites dans le respect du principe fondamental de non-refoulement et des garanties d’une procédure régulière, est un autre sujet de préoccupation. Un grand nombre de personnes migrantes inscrites au programme d’AVR sont victimes de multiples violations des droits de l’homme (par exemple, subies au cours de leur migration et dans les pays de transit) et ont besoin d’une protection fondée sur le droit international. Cependant, très peu de personnes sont orientées vers une demande d’asile/procédure de détermination du statut de réfugié, et les autres sont traitées en vue de leur retour. L’objectif ultime des programmes d’AVR, à savoir le retour des migrants, ne peut pas prévaloir sur les considérations en lien avec les droits de l’homme pour chaque cas. Cela soulève également des préoccupations en termes de responsabilité, d’accès à la justice et de recours pour les migrants victimes de violations des droits de l’homme.

Rôle des bailleurs de fonds internationaux et en particulier de l’UE

Bien que les principaux responsables gouvernementaux ont souligné que l’objectif de réduction des migrations vers le nord était principalement une décision de politique nationale, il est nécessaire de souligner le rôle et la responsabilité de la communauté internationale et des bailleurs de fond à cet égard. En effet, plusieurs sources ont déclaré que la politique nigérienne en matière de migration est fortement influencée et principalement conduite selon les demandes de l’Union européenne et de ses États membres en matière de contrôle de la migration en échange d’un soutien financier. Par exemple, le fait que le Fonds fiduciaire de l’Union européenne apporte un soutien financier à l’OIM en grande partie pour sensibiliser et renvoyer les migrants dans leur pays d’origine, même lorsque le caractère volontaire est souvent discutable, compromet son approche fondée sur les droits dans la coopération pour le développement. De plus, d’après mes échanges avec l’Union européenne, aucun soutien n’est prévu pour les migrants qui ne sont ni des réfugiés ni pour ceux qui n’ont pas accepté d’être renvoyés volontairement dans leur pays d’origine. En outre, le rôle et le soutien de l’UE dans l’adoption et la mise en œuvre de la loi sur le trafic illicite de migrants remettent en question son principe de « ne pas nuire » compte tenu des préoccupations en matière de droits de l’homme liées à la mise en œuvre et exécution de la loi.

►https://www.ohchr.org/FR/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23698&LangID=F
#droits_humains #droits_de_l'homme_des_migrants #Niger #asile #migrations #réfugiés

African migration ’a trickle’ thanks to trafficking ban across the Sahara

The number of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean for Europe has been dropping and that is partly because of tougher measures introduced on the migrant routes, as Mike Thomson reports from Niger.

In a small dusty courtyard near the centre of Agadez, a town on the fringes of the Sahara desert, Bachir Amma, eats lunch with his family.

A line of plastic chairs, clinging to the shadow of the mud walls, are the only visible furniture.

Mr Amma, a former people smuggler, dressed in a faded blue denim shirt and jeans, has clearly known better days.

"I stopped trafficking migrants to the Libyan border when the new law came in.

"It’s very, very strict. If you’re caught you get a long time in jail and they confiscate your vehicle.

“If the law was eased I would go back to people trafficking, that’s for sure. It earned me as much as $6,000 (£4,700) a week, far more money than anything I can do now.”
Traffickers jailed

The law Mr Amma mentioned, which banned the transport of migrants through northern Niger, was brought in by the government in 2015 following pressure from European countries.

Before then such work was entirely legal, as Niger is a member of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) that permits the free movement of people.

Police even provided armed escorts for the convoys involved. But since the law was passed many traffickers have been jailed and hundreds of their vehicles confiscated.

Before 2015, the Agadez region was home to more than 6,000 people traffickers like Mr Amma, according to figures from the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) .

Collectively they transported around 340,000 Europe-bound migrants through the Sahara desert to Libya.
Migration in reverse

Since the clampdown this torrent has become a relative trickle.

In fact, more African migrants, who have ended up in Niger and experienced or heard of the terrible dangers and difficulties of getting to Europe, have decided to return home.

This year alone 16,000 have decided to accept offers from the IOM to fly them back.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/BFC3/production/_105119094_niger_migration_640-nc.png

A large and boisterous IOM-run transit centre in Agadez is home to hundreds of weary, homesick migrants.

In one large hut around 20 young men, from a variety of West African countries, attend a class on how to set up a small business when they get home.

Among them is 27-year-old Umar Sankoh from Sierra Leone, who was dumped in the Sahara by a trafficker when he was unable to pay him more money.

“The struggle is so hard in the desert, so difficult to find your way. You don’t have food, you don’t have nothing, even water you can’t drink. It’s so terrible,” he said.

Now, Mr Sankoh has given up his dreams of a better life in Europe and only has one thought in mind: "I want to go home.

"My family will be happy because it’s been a long time so they must believe I am dead.

“If they see me now they’ll think, ’Oh my God, God is working!’”
Coast guards intercept vessels

Many thousands of migrants who make it to Libya are sold on by their traffickers to kidnappers who try and get thousands of dollars from their families back home.

Those who cannot pay are often tortured, sometimes while being forced to ask relatives for money over the phone, and held in atrocious conditions for months.

With much of the country in the grip of civil war, such gangs can operate there with impunity.

In an effort to curb the number of migrants making for southern Europe by boat, thousands of whom have drowned on the way, coast guards trained by the European Union (EU) try and stop or intercept often flimsy vessels.

Those on board are then taken to detention centres, where they are exposed to squalid, hugely overcrowded conditions and sometimes beatings and forced hard labour.
Legal resettlement offers

In November 2017, the EU funded a special programme to evacuate the most vulnerable refugees in centres like these.

Under this scheme, which is run by the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), a little more than 2,200 people have since been flown to the comparative safety of neighbouring Niger.

There, in a compound in the capital, Niamey, they wait for the chance to be resettled in a European country, including the UK, as well as Canada and the US.

So far just under 1,000 have been resettled and 264 accepted for resettlement.

The rest await news of their fate.

▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46802548
#cartographie

Commentaire de Alizée Daouchy via la mailing-list Migreurop:

Rien de très nouveau dans cet article, il traite des routes migratoires dans le Sahara mais ne s’intéresse qu’au cas d’Agadez.
L’auteur qualifie les « flux » dans le Sahara de « migration in reverse ». Alors qu’avant l’adoption de la loi contre le trafic de migrants (2015), 340 000 personnes traversaient le désert du Sahara vers la Libye (sans préciser pour quelle(s) année(s)), en 2018, 16 000 personnes ont été ’retournées’ dans leur pays d’origine par l’#OIM.

Pour autant, des ’trafiquants’ continuent leurs activités en empruntant des routes plus dangereuses pour éviter les forces de l’ordre. A ce sujet la représentante de l’UNHCR au Niger rappelle que : la communauté internationale ("we, the international Community, the UNHCR") considère que pour chaque mort en Méditerranée, il y en aurait au moins deux dans le désert". Mais toujours pas de sources concernant ces chiffres.

#migrations_inversées #migrations_inverses

After crackdown, what do people employed in migration market do?

Thousands in Niger were employed as middlemen until the government, aided by the EU, targeted undocumented migration.

A group of women are squeezed into a modest room, ready to take their class in a popular district of Agadez, the largest city in central Niger.

A blackboard hangs on the wall and Mahaman Alkassoum, chalk in hand, is ready to begin.

A former people smuggler, he is an unusual professor.

His round face and shy expression clash with the image of the ruthless trafficker.

“We’re here to help you organise your savings, so that your activities will become profitable,” Alkassoum tells the women, before drawing a timeline to illustrate the different stages of starting a business.

Until mid-2016, both he and the women in the room were employed in Agadez’s huge migration market, which offered economic opportunities for thousands of people in an immense desert region, bordering with Algeria, Libya and Chad.

Alkassoum used to pack his pick-up truck with up to 25 migrants at once, driving them across the Sahara from Agadez to the southern Libyan city of Sebha, earning up to 1,500 euros ($1,706) a month - five times the salary of a local policeman.

All of us suffered with the end of migration in Agadez. We’re toasting peanuts every day and thinking of new ways to earn something.

Habi Amaloze, former cook for migrants

The women, his current students, were employed as cooks in the ghettos and yards where migrants were hosted during their stay in town.

At times, they fed 100 people a day and earned about 200 euros ($227) a month.

For decades, the passage of western African migrants heading to Libya, and eventually to Italian shores, happened in daylight, in full view - and in most cases with the complicity of Niger security forces.

According to a 2016 study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), migrants in transit had injected about 100 million euros ($113.8m) into the local economy,

But the “golden age” of migration through Agadez ended abruptly in the summer of 2016 when the government of Niger launched a crackdown on people smuggling.

More than 300 drivers, middlemen and managers of ghettos, have been arrested since then, convincing other colleagues - like Alkassoum and his students - to abandon their activity.

The driver’s new career as a community organiser began right after, when most locals involved in the smuggling business realised they had to somehow reinvent their lives.

At first, a few hundred men, former drivers or managers of ghettos, decided to set up an informal association, with the idea of raising funds between members to launch small commercial activities.

But the project didn’t really work, Alkassoum recounts. In early 2018, the leader of the group, a renowned smuggler, disappeared with some of the funds.

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2019/2/21/c110625427d74a379be1967c2a7d96dc_18.jpg

Alkassoum, at the time the association’s secretary, got discouraged.

That was the moment when their female colleagues showed up.

Most of them were wives or sisters of smugglers, who were cooking for the migrants inside ghettos and, all of a sudden, had also seen their source of income disappear.

Resorting to an old experience as a youth leader, Alkassoum decided to help them launch new businesses, through lessons on community participation and bookkeeping.

As of mid-2018, more than 70 women had joined.

“At first we met to share our common suffering after losing our jobs, but soon we realised we needed to do more,” says Fatoumata Adiguini at the end of the class.

They decided to launch small businesses, dividing themselves into subgroups, each one developing a specific idea.

Habi Amaloze, a thin Tuareg woman, heads one of the groups: 17 women that called themselves “banda badantchi” - meaning “no difference” in Hausa - to share their common situation.

The banda badantchi started with the cheapest possible activity, shelling and toasting peanuts to sell on the streets.

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2019/2/21/9a88aeafbd8a474da59803592c1a7e78_18.jpg

Other groups collected small sums to buy a sheep, chicks or a sewing machine.

“We started with what we had, which was almost nothing, but we dream to be able one day to open up a restaurant or a small farming activity,” explains Amaloze.

While most men left Agadez to find opportunities elsewhere, the women never stopped meeting and built relations of trust.

Besides raising their children, they have another motivation: working with migrants has freed them from marital control, something they are not willing or ready to lose.

According to Rhissa Feltou, the mayor of Agadez, the crackdown on northbound migration responded to European requests more than to local needs.

Since 2015, the European Union earmarked 230 million euros ($261.7m) from its Emergency Trust Fund of Africa for projects in Niger, making it the main beneficiary of a fund created to “address the root causes of migration”.

Among the projects, the creation of a police investigative unit, where French and Spanish policemen helped their Nigerien counterparts to track and arrest smugglers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2019/2/21/078933e2316048709a8a9b73dc4061e6_18.jpg

Another project, known under its acronym Paiera, aimed at relieving the effect of the migration crackdown in Agadez, included a compensation scheme for smugglers who left their old job. The eight million-euro ($9.2m) fund was managed by the High Authority for the Consolidation of Peace, a state office tasked with reducing conflicts in border areas.

After endless negotiations between local authorities, EU representatives and a committee representing smugglers, a list of 6,550 smuggling actors operating in the region of Agadez, was finalised in 2017.

But two years after the project’s launch, only 371 of them received small sums, about 2,300 euros ($2,616) per person, to start new activities.

The High Authority for the Consolidation of Peace told Al Jazeera that an additional eight million-euro fund is available for a second phase of the project, to be launched in March 2019, allowing at least 600 more ex-smugglers to be funded.

But Feltou, the city’s mayor, isn’t optimistic.

“We waited too much and it’s still unclear when and how these new provisions will be delivered,” he explains.

Finding viable job opportunities for thousands of drivers, managers of ghettos, middlemen, cooks or water can sellers, who lost their main source of income in a country the United Nations dubbed as the last in its human development index in 2018, is not an easy task.

For the European Union, nonetheless, this cooperation has been a success. Northbound movements registered by the IOM along the main desert trail from Agadez to the Libyan border, dropped from 298,000 people a year in 2016 to about 50,000 in 2018.

In a January 2019 report, the EU commission described such a cooperation with Niger as “constructive and fruitful”.

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2019/2/21/982198e48a0e467c8e843e4c2a0299fb_18.jpg

Just like other women in her group, Habi Amaloze was disregarded by Brussels-funded programmes like Paiera.

But the crackdown changed her life dramatically.

Her brother, who helped her after her husband died years ago, was arrested in 2017, forcing the family to leave their rented house.

With seven children, ranging from five to 13 years old, and a sick mother, they settled in a makeshift space used to store building material. Among piles of bricks, they built two shacks out of sticks, paperboard and plastic bags, to keep them safe from sand storms.

“This is all we have now,” Amaloze says, pointing to a few burned pots and a mat.

In seven years of work as a cook in her brother’s ghetto, she fed tens of thousands of migrants. Now she can hardly feed her family.

“At that time I earned at least 35,000 [West African franc] a week [about $60], now it can be as low as 2,000 [$3.4], enough to cook macaroni once a day for the kids, but no sauce,” she says, her voice breaking.

Only one of her children still attends school.

Her experience is familiar among the women she meets weekly. “All of us suffered with the end of migration in Agadez,” she says.

Through their groups, they found hope and solidarity. But their future is still uncertain.

“We’re toasting peanuts every day and thinking of new ways to earn something,” Hamaloze says with a mix of bitterness and determination. “But, like all our former colleagues, we need real opportunities otherwise migration through Agadez and the Sahara will resume, in a more violent and painful way than before.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2019/2/21/c58f97b1fcca406c80aee33b413a8c76_18.jpg

[Reportage] A Vintimille, les migrants gardent l’espoir de passer la frontière

Des centaines de réfugiés stationnent dans la petite ville de la Riviera italienne. Ils tentent par tous les moyens de franchir la frontière, à quelques kilomètres, fermée unilatéralement par la France depuis juin 2015. De Menton en bord de mer à Breil-sur-Roya dans la montagne, la police française traque et expulse systématiquement. Au terme d’un été mouvementé, Vintimille reste un cul-de-sac, alors qu’à Bruxelles, c’est également l’impasse.

http://scd.rfi.fr/sites/filesrfi/dynimagecache/0/641/4636/2619/1024/578/sites/images.rfi.fr/files/aef_image/vintimille6_1_0.jpg

►http://www.rfi.fr/hebdo/20160930-vintimille-migrants-refugies-italie-france-frontiere-europe-soudan-migr

Hungary: UNHCR concerned about new restrictive law, increased reports of #violence, and a deterioration of the situation at border with Serbia.

We are deeply concerned about further restrictions by Hungary leading to push-backs of people seeking asylum and reports about the use of violence and abuse. These restrictions are at variance with EU and international law and reports of abuse need to be investigated. The number of refugees and migrants at the Serbia-Hungary border has reached over 1,400, including people waiting to enter the transit zones, as well as those at the Refugee Aid Point at Subotica. The majority are women and children who are particularly affected by the deteriorating humanitarian situation. States have the obligation to guarantee that such people are treated humanely, in safety and dignity, and have access to asylum, if they so wish.

▻http://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing/2016/7/5788aae94/hungary-unhcr-concerned-new-restrictive-law-increased-reports-violence.html

#barbelés #frontières #fermeture_des_frontières #Grèce #Macédoine #Idomeni #désespoir #murs #barrières #barrières_frontalières #attente #antichambre #zone-tampon

Ce qu’il y a de particulier ici, c’est le désespoir extrême, absolu. Ces gens ont quitté des pays dévastés par la guerre. Ils ont accompli un dangereux voyage, souvent avec leurs enfants sur les épaules. Et les voici maintenant bloqués dans une mare de boue face aux portes fermées de l’Europe, obligés de vivre dans des conditions aussi déplorables que chez eux, sans avoir la moindre idée de ce qui va leur arriver ensuite. Certains végètent ici depuis deux ou trois mois. Ils n’ont rien d’autre à faire qu’attendre, dans l’incertitude totale. Pourront-ils rejoindre l’Europe de l’Ouest comme l’ont fait des centaines de milliers de réfugiés avant eux ? Seront-ils reconduits de force en Turquie ? Devront-ils, au final, rentrer chez eux ?

#réfugiés #asile #migrations #incertitude #blocage

Y-a un mot sur le statut des kurdes ou pas ? Ils sont jihadistes ? Ils sont rebelles ? S’ils sont rebelles, sont-ils jugés assez « modérés » ?

#Daech #ISIS #Etats-Unis #Arabie #Qatar #France #Grande-Bretagne

Macedonia: al fianco dei volontari che aiutano i migranti

Mentre lo stato macedone dichiara l’emergenza ed invia l’esercito al confine con la Grecia il portale BIRN ha raggiunto alcuni dei volontari che trascorrono le loro notti ad aiutare e assistere i migranti

▻http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Macedonia/Macedonia-al-fianco-dei-volontari-che-aiutano-i-migranti-163585