AYS Daily Digest 10/3/21: Evictions, deportations and outsourced securitisation
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Migration, Germany, Digest, Europe, Refugees

GREECE

Three victims of a fire in Thessaloniki

3 people have been found dead following a fire in an abandoned building in the center of Thessaloniki, reported the fire department. The three men, believed to have been from Algeria, had been living on the third floor of the abandoned building, say media reports. Firefighters said the men appeared to have died of smoke inhalation. A fourth person, who told authorities he was from Morocco, survived the accident. Reportedly, it was not immediately clear what caused the blaze. However, such accidents are recurring events along the Route, where people reside to using unsafe spaces as shelters due to a lack of accommodation and living structures where they could support themselves.

SERBIA

An increase in the numbers of unaccompanied and separated children

Info Park regularly distributes the information leaflets in Pashto, Persian, Arabic and English languages with the SOS phone number

Info Park noted an increase in the numbers of unaccompanied and separated children residing outside official centers in the Belgrade area. Last week, their team provided information, translation, referrals to the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration and the Belgrade Center for Social Work for support after being pushed-back and inclusion in age-appropriate activities for over 45 unaccompanied boys.

Most of the boys were from Afghanistan, who are constantly trying the “game” and sleeping rough in Belgrade and the border area. During the interviews, it was clear that they lack correct and timely information on their rights and the institutions providing child-safeguarding services.

CROATIA

borders: none are organising a new beginners programming course. Lasting 3 months in total, the initial workshops will take place over the next two weeks.

If you’d like to come and hear more about the course, contact us in inbox or on Whatsapp +385 97 700 1652! Application is mandatory!

The requirements are:

- that you’re a refugee or asylum seeker in Croatia;

- a migrant with lower socio-economic status;

- speak English at the level needed to follow the class;

- highly motivated to learn technology on a daily basis.

FRANCE

Community action for Madama

The already fabled trust held by people on the move—as well as those under international protection—in any of the systems they find themselves in along the way is often shattered nowadays by the very representatives of that system.

One such story comes from Puy-de-Dôme, central France.

A boy from Mali, who had arrived to there two years ago, when he was barely 16, lives with a local family who had been asked by the authorities to take care of him, and were glad to do so. When he was summoned to renew his documents, the young man was detained and was put in a detention centre, reportedly under the accusation that he’d falsified his birth certificate.

“If he returns to Mali, he will find himself in extreme poverty and there are Islamists at the gates of his village. It is his life that will be destroyed, and ours too”, said the family with whom he has been living all this time. They also say it was they who communicated with Mali to retrieve his documents, not the boy who was a minor at the time.

For more than two years, they have been hosting and accompanying the young Malian. A judge placed him in their home when he was only 16. Since then, Madama has been in school, he has learned French, he has made friends, and a master is waiting for him to get his papers in order to find him a job.

Very quickly, the community where this young apprentice baker, Madama, lives organised a support action and created a petition that gathered more than 35,000 signatures.

The locals are determined to do everything they can to keep their friend, fellow citizen—a young person who had escaped dangers in what happens to be his country of origin and could have been anyone else’s.

SPAIN

Outsourced destruction and violent returns

After mass-crossing yesterday to Melilla (as reported in yesterday’s Daily News Digest), Moroccan police have arrested hundreds and will deport them.

Among the arrested are many women and children, reported Alarm Phone.

39 women, 12 children and over 100 men were arrested. Sources on the ground say that the men will be deported to their countries of origin, while the women and children will be pushed away from the border.

The Canary Islands: return orders enforceable at any time?

Dozens of people have been detained in recent weeks in the Canary Islands as they await the return orders to be executed that were issued against them when they arrived in the Canary Islands by boat.

Details: The court recognizes that the Aliens Act determines that it is not necessary to process an expulsion file for a person who has entered Spain irregularly; in such cases the person is formally “returned” to his or her country of origin, not expelled. But, when the return cannot be carried out within 72 hours, the judicial authority requests the internment measure provided for the expulsion files.

In a currently ongoing case, it is emphasized that the Government Delegation intends to deport the person in question to his country even though almost three months have passed since his return was ordered, that is, “after the 72-hour period established by the norm has elapsed and after the foreigner has been at liberty after being detained for return.”

Lawyers in the Canary Islands have complained that their clients were frequently detained to be expelled immediately on a deportation flight scheduled for the following days as part of the execution of the return order issued against them upon arrival in the archipelago. Some have been arrested and deported after going to the airport with their passport in order to fly to the peninsula.

The order of the Hearing of Santa Cruz de Tenerife that establishes this precedent and this interpretation on how to apply the return and expulsion mechanisms is firm, as the resolution itself clarifies in its operative section.

Activists opposing the deportation policies, such as Stop Deportación, have noted that these developments might especially affect those from Morocco and people from Senegal, often without translators and legal support.

GERMANY

Deportations continue, although some courts oppose them

While some of the charter flights to Kabul deporting people from the EU are organized by the EU border agency Frontex, Germany has continued organising their own deportation flights.

In their recent release, Pro Asyl warned that in spite of the pandemic and evidence for the situation in Afghanistan, a considerable number of interior ministers are still pushing for deportations to Afghanistan. The group has recently called out the Robert Koch Institute to disclose why and how they came to a drastic change in assessment of the current conditions and safety situation of Afghanistan in such a short time since their last estimate that stated it was by no means a safe place.

The interior ministers of some federal states push through deportations with stoic indifference regardless of the situation.

Some deportations are stopped at the last minute by the courts, but many others aren’t, they say, explaining that it often depends on chance whether an Afghan who is arrested in a raid with the purpose of deportation can find legal support within such a short time. In that case, they should be lucky enough to end up at a court that has the courage to withstand pressure from the interior ministers and to re-open the case to stop the deportation at the last minute.

989 people have been deported to Afghanistan since 2016. Read more on deportations from Germany here. In our “worth reading” section, read more on how the pandemic affected people in search for international protection.

Deportation from the almost empty Hanover airport on March 9, 2021. Photo: SaschaSchiessl / via Twitter, via: Afghanistan Zhaghdablai — Thomas Ruttig über Afghanistan

DENMARK

An alarming reminder

As we reported earlier, Denmark has taken a very wrong–right (wing) turn in their migration policies. Danish authorities ruled that the security situation around Damascus has improved, despite all the apparent evidence of ongoing suffering, dire living conditions, the fact that half of the country’s children have spent their lives in a war, and continued persecution by the regime.

As a result of such a decision, the country has recently stripped

94 people under international protection of their right to stay in the country. They have also recently introduced a proposal that would aim to move all asylum applicants outside Denmark.

Syria is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a returns context:

WORTH READING

‘It’s the poverty and inequality that kills people, not the virus.’

Journalists in Greece say censorship, intimidation and restrictions on access are getting worse under the ruling conservatives.

Along with this, it is good to be reminded of some of the images that are hard to watch, coming with first-hand information about the reality (updated before this News Digest was published):