Defending refugees in Europe – mission impossible for their lawyers?

Just a few years in the past, throughout an interview on the Pact on migration and asylum that the European Fee had simply introduced, the Italian lawyer Anna Brambilla stated to me: “I suggest to discovered the TGMAFL: Transnational Group of Mutual Support for Annoyed Attorneys”. Midway between a joke and a name to motion, the concept of Brambilla (who’s a member of the Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione, Asgi) was born of an commentary: in a Europe that’s more and more hostile to exiled migrants, and confronted with the continuing dismantling of the best to asylum, defending the rights of migrants has turn out to be nearly mission not possible. As a occupation, it has been rendered nearly meaningless by political assaults on so-called “militant legal professionals”.

The state of affairs has not improved since 2020. A way of powerlessness has grown amongst legal professionals engaged on behalf of asylum seekers and others looking for to regularise their presence within the EU. European governments, of proper and left, are working to limit the rights of foreigners by altering legal guidelines or ignoring them, and trampling on elementary rights within the course of.

No observe is extra emblematic on this respect than that of refoulements. Whereas worldwide legislation prohibits the return of asylum-seekers to locations the place their lives could be in peril, this has the truth is turn out to be widespread observe in a number of member states, each on the EU’s exterior borders (Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Hungary, the checklist goes on) and at inside ones (resembling between France and Italy). Lithuania has simply taken a serious step by passing a legislation legalising the observe, however a lot of the nations that perform refoulements on the border achieve this by knowingly breaking the legislation.

On Lesbos, a Greek island some ten kilometres off the Turkish coast, refoulements are taking place “nearly day by day, generally a number of instances a day, one thing the authorities systematically deny”, says Ozan Mirkan Balpetek, advocacy and communications officer on the Authorized Centre Lesvos (LCL), a Greek-registered non-profit organisation that gives free authorized help to migrants.

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