The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner has critcised European governments for trying to water down protections for migrants.
Last month, nine European governments including Poland, Denmark and Italy published an open letter calling for a “better balance” in the way the European Convention on Human Rights is applied when it comes to migration.
Countries on the front line like Italy and Greece particularly feel the pressure of migrants arriving across the Mediterranean Sea.
Under international law, those countries are obliged to rescue and look after new arrivals.
The migrant pressure is supposed to be shared across the European Union, but the system doesn’t work in practice.
And migration has now become a hot topic right across Europe, even in Ireland, despite the country receiving only a small number of migrants.
“Recent days have witnessed horrific scenes in the small town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland. There, night after night, rioting thugs have tyrannised men, women and children simply because they come from somewhere else”, said the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty.
“The shocking scenes remind me of the recent repeated arson attacks on migration accommodation centres across the Republic of Ireland. Both phenomena have been fed at least in part by hateful online disinformation.”
But his concern now is that politics across Europe is shifting. And that treating migrants as ‘other’ is becoming normalised.
The letter signed by nine EU member states (Ireland was not one of them) has shocked him.
“It is carefully phrased, but nevertheless, it weaves a narrative of a loss of control of our borders and puts a focus on the criminality of some migrants”, says O’Flaherty.
In the letter, the nine leaders argue: “The world has changed fundamentally since many of our ideas were conceived in the ashes of the great wars. The ideas themselves are universal and everlasting. However, we now live in a globalized world where people migrate across borders on a completely different scale.”
It continues:
“We also believe that there is a need to look at how the European Court of Human Rights has developed its interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Whether the Court, in some cases, has extended the scope of the Convention too far as compared with the original intentions behind the Convention, thus shifting the balance between the interests which should be protected.
We believe that the development in the Court’s interpretation has, in some cases, limited our ability to make political decisions in our own democracies. And thereby affected how we as leaders can protect our democratic societies and our populations against the challenges facing us in the world today.”
But Michael O’Flaherty says that interpretation is wrong.
“There is so much to repudiate and challenge in the statement of the nine countries”, he says.
“It grossly over speaks the incidence of criminality within migrant communities, it refers not so much as once to refugees fleeing persecution. It posits evidence free claims such as that the European Court of Human Rights makes the protection of our societies more difficult. It disregards how states can pursue legitimate goals like securing our borders without backtracking on respect for human rights.
What is more, it proposes the establishment of a sort of hierarchy of rights- holders, with law abiding citizens in a superior position to “the wrong people”.
And all of this is framed in a discourse suggesting that it draws its authority from the will of the people.
Where, I ask, is acknowledgement of article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whereby, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”?
Where is the recognition that the perceived will of the people must always be subject to the rule of law, including the application of the international human rights treaties?
Where is the appreciation of the steadfast practice, in Europe at least, for human rights treaty development to always be in the service of strengthened rather than weakened protection of human beings?
As for the will of the people, I do acknowledge that this is a tricky time to govern, with waves of disinformation sweeping across our societies, patterns of deep economic inequality and low levels of trust in political and other institutions. But the answer is not to disavow our values. It is certainly not to pick at the web of human rights protections so laboriously put in place after the horrors of the Second World War.
Instead, governance should be evidence-based, addressing the true root causes of unease. It should also adopt an historical perspective, not only learning from our past but also recognising how an act of today can have appalling future consequences.
It is time to wise-up to how dangerous a moment this is. Today the focus is on migrants; tomorrow it will be another vulnerable minority group; eventually it could be any of us.
I call on the nine governments to reconsider their position. I call on all Council of Europe member states to be steadfast in protecting the human rights of everyone.”
The letter was signed by the prime ministers of Italy, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, the President of Lithuania and the Chancellor of Austria.