Sharp criticism of Paris Summit

On Tuesday, the Göttingen-based human rights organization Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) criticized the results of the Paris Refugee Summit, stating that if applications for asylum by refugees from North-African countries were to be decided on by local authorities, politically persecuted people and war refugees from Africa would de facto have no right to apply for asylum. In Germany, but also in other European countries, the review processes are already so bad that politically persecuted persons from Africa don’t have much of a choice but to take their case to court. According to the Paris resolutions, this would no longer be possible if their applications were decided on in North Africa: this would deprive them of the possibility of taking legal action to find shelter in Europe to save their lives.

“From our everyday experience, we know that the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) rejects most of the applications for asylum by Oromo from Ethiopia, Darfuris and Nuba from Sudan’s war zones, and Biafrans from Nigeria – even though these people are acutely politically persecuted in their home countries,” said Ulrich Delius, the STP’s director. The quality of the asylum procedures in Europe had become worse and worse – due to political pressure, due to the staff’s lack of knowledge of the countries of origin, and due to insufficient training. From the point of view of a human rights organization, it is inacceptable that most of the asylum applications by Oromo from Ethiopia are rejected, although more than 2,000 Oromo got killed in politically motivated violence by the army and the police in 2016. According to the BAMF, Biafrans are not politically persecuted in Nigeria, although there have been hundreds of politically motivated arrests, and despite the arbitrary shootings and mass graves.

The human rights activist strongly criticized that the European heads of state are apparently not willing to actually combat the causes of flight in Africa, to try and find peaceful solutions for the ongoing armed conflicts, and to advocate for more democracy. “Anyone who cooperates with Africa’s despots to try and reduce the number of refugees is stoking flight and migration in the longer term,” Delius warned. “It would be against the principles of the European Union to have applications for asylum decided on in countries without a functioning legal system, such as Libya or Chad. Populist ideas like this won’t help to solve the conflicts in Africa, but will cause an even stronger migration movement.”

Header Photo: United Nations Photo via Flickr