(Re)construction | The case of Moria (Jean Ziegler, Shirin Tinnesand & Max Pichl)
Channel: medico international
Date: 2021-03-26

Disenfranchised and degraded to objects of humanitarian aid: Refugees at Europe’s borders

Discussants:
Maximilian Pichl (Legal scholar, Frankfurt)
Shirin Tinnesand (Communications officer, Stand by me Lesvos, Mytilini)
Jean Ziegler (Sociologist, Switzerland)
Facilitator: Ramona Lenz (Anthropologist, medico international, Frankfurt)

The now burned down refugee camp near Moria on Lesbos has become a symbol of Europe's misguided refugee policy. Refugees are systematically disenfranchised and then degraded to objects of humanitarian aid. In a woolly conglomeration of migration management, security policy and mercy, human rights fall short, while aid has hardly been able to improve the situation on the ground, even after years. Spaces without democratic and rule-of-law structures are created, where the aid regime takes control together with the security apparatus. But how can it be that NGOs across Europe are raising funds under the banner of "Moria" without any noticeable improvement in the situation of the few thousand people on the ground? What kind of aid could also counteract the disenfranchisement of refugees?

Maximilian Pichl studied law and political science at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He then worked as a legal policy adviser for the human rights organization PRO ASYL e.V. His research focuses on critical legal theory, refugee and migration law, and police law. He is currently researching the constitutional reappraisal of the murder series of the "National Socialist Underground" (NSU) and the institutional changes in EU migration policy since the "Summer of Migration 2015". He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Forum Recht and the Grundrechte-Report, as well as an active member of the Network for migration law.

Shirin Tinnesand is currently enlisted at the Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway, researching the role of international aid organisations in refugee camps and crisis areas. She is of Norwegian and Kurdish descent, and has been a fellow at the universities of India, Nepal, Argentina, Vietnam and then completed extensive field research in Ghana. Since the beginning of 2020 she consulted the Greek organisation Stand By Me Lesvos with public relations and has assisted various refugee self-organisations in capacity building. Recently she published various articles on the scenery of Moria Refugee Camp.

Jean Ziegler is one of the icons of the anti-globalization movement. A sociologist by training, he taught in Geneva and at the Sorbonne in Paris, was a member of the Swiss Parliament until 1999, and was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000 to 2008. He was also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council and sits on the advisory board of the NGO Business Crime Control. Ziegler coined the phrase "Every person who dies of hunger today is murdered," and his publications such as "Switzerland Washes Whiter" have sparked broad controversy. Most recently, he published "The Shame of Europe. Of Refugees and Human Rights" (2020).

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The (Re)Construction of the World. Aid. Solidarity. Politics.

A conference not only on the miserable state of the world, but also and above all on the possibilities of its reconstruction into a place that will finally be worth inhabiting. In lectures and forums, the aim is to determine the relationship between aid, solidarity and politics from the promise we made to ourselves in the Declaration of Human Rights: The promise of a global and social order in which the rights granted to us all would be fully realized.

The online conference (February 12th until February 14th, 2021) was organized by medico international e. V. in cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt, International Institute of Political Murder and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

www.medico.de/en/reconstruction