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THE COMMON EUROPEAN ASYLUM SYSTEM ADRIFT
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During the period following the ratification
of the Geneva Convention in 1951, refugees fell
more or less into two basic categories: survivors
of World War II concentration camps and exiles
fleeing communist countries. All of these people
were white, European, and had cultural back-
grounds similar to our own. The plights of both
of these groups elicited a positive moral re-
sponse: pity in the case of the former and re-
spect in the case of the latter, who had fought
against the threat that many believed commu-
nism supposed for Europe at that time.
New groups arriving in 1970s such as exiles
fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and
Southeast Asian “boat people” escaping com-
munist repression in Vietnam inspired similar
sentiments. Admiration for the first and com-
passion for the second prompted Europe to
open its doors to them.
Policies began to change in the 1980s. As
the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 dissolved the
last of its remaining internal borders, Europe
was busy constructing an invisible, more omi-
nous and powerful external border under the
Schengen Convention implemented in 1990.
From this point on, European political dis-
course intentionally framed asylum seekers as
illegal immigrants and public perception of refu-
gees began to change. People fleeing conflict
zones were increasingly suspected of fraudu-
lently posing as innocent victims in need of asy-
lum. Although the persecution of Chechenians
in Russia, Tamils in Sri Lanka and Darfurians in
Sudan was well known and widely covered by
European media, the plight of these groups
sparked little public empathy and few people
fleeing these situations were granted interna-
tional protection by European countries.
Nothing changed during the first decade of
the new millennium, during which Haitians sub-
jected to political violence and human rights
violations in the wake of a catastrophic earth-
quake and victims of a brutal civil war that
claimed over three million lives in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo stirred almost no public
sentiment in Europe in favour of asylum.
The message of that foreigners beyond EU
borders were not to be trusted and represented
a menace to our well-being had hit its mark and
a fortress Europe mentality had taken root.
The percentage of asylum applications recog-
nised in Europe plunged dramatically. Instead of
questioning the limits they were imposing on ac-
cess to protection (an exercise that would have
clearly signalled a failure to respect international
treaties), governments throughout Europe in-
creasingly viewed asylum as a legal instrument
of protection, a position that restricted entry to
a select and carefully screened few.
For all intents and purposes, legal asylum has
gradually slipped out of the reach of most peo-
ple in need of it, losing its status as a right and,
in the process, becoming a coveted privilege.
Nevertheless, the thousands of people flee-
ing terror and in desperate need of protection
who are knocking on the gates of Europe today
have kindled a more receptive attitude towards
refugees.
The consequences of the fortification of
Europe and the deterioration of the right
to asylum
One of the stopgap solutions being applied to
deal with this new wave of arrivals, which is
nothing other than the catastrophic conse-
quence of misguided border tightening policies
implemented since the 1990s on the premise of
our need to protect ourselves from external
threats at the cost of devaluating the right to