EU leaders laud stricter migration policies that rights groups blame for 3,000 deaths last year
As the European Union and also its member states individually adopt tougher measures on migrants, most notably those undertaking treacherous Mediterranean sea crossings from Africa’s northern shores, human rights groups have slammed the change in EU’s policies, saying they are creating a “cruel system” that is partly to blame for drownings of more than 3,000 people last year.
With elections for the European Parliament to be held in two months, and with the far right expected to gain seats, politicians across the political spectrum largely focus their rhetoric on the need to police human trafficking and smuggling. The human drama playing out at sea — including 19 bodies recovered by Tunisia’s Coast Guard, five dead migrants trying to cross the English Channel and 52 sub-Saharan migrants en route to Canary Islands intercepted by Moroccan authorities only last week — is pragmatically pushed to the sidelines. It was as the broad political EU center seeks to stem gains by the far right that the EU lawmakers approved recently a revamped migration system that promises to increase migrant repatriation to reduce unwanted immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
Human rights activists, however, remind that illegal migrants take perilous sea journeys to flee conflict, poverty or persecution in Africa, Middle East and Asia, hoping for a better life on European shores. Several groups running rescue missions in the Mediterranean, including Amnesty, Oxfam, Caritas and Save the Children, have recently called for a change in the EU’s policies, saying in an open letter that they are partly to blame for 3,000 deaths in Mediterranean in 2023. “A policy-made crisis has been unfolding across Europe, at its borders, and beyond, which has resulted in a surge in deaths, despair and destitution among people attempting to seek safety and protection within the European Union,” says Médecins Sans Frontières, an NGO, in its recent report titled ‘Death, Despair and Destitution: The Human Costs of the EU’s Migration Policies’.
