Protesters take part in a march against Islamophobia in Brussels in 2014 (AFP)

BRUSSELS – European academics and policymakers came together at the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday to launch what they describe as a “toolkit” to tackle Islamophobia across the continent.

The report, based on research in eight countries including the UK, France and Germany, said it had identified a “worsening environment of Islamophobia” in which Muslims faced a “new and acceptable hostility… in many spheres of everyday life”.

“This is an issue that is poisoning our societies in the European Union and putting barriers between our communities,” said Jean Lambert, a Green Party member of the European Parliament (MEP) representing London, during the opening of the conference in Belgium.

Long present across the continent, the report highlights how Islamophobia has been further bolstered in the past decade, tied to the rise of far-right and anti-immigration movements in many European countries, the “War on Terror” both within and outside Europe, and the refugee crisis.

Recent examples included former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s newspaper column last month in which he compared niqab-wearing women to ‘letterboxes’.

In France, a veiled student union leader was publicly chastised for a televised appearance and caricatured as a monkey by a prominent satirical outlet; in Germany, stories in the media about alleged roving bands of rapist refugees stoked panic; while several countries across Europe have passed so-called “burqa bans“, restricting the wearing of niqabs and Muslim veils in public spaces.

While countering such a wave of xenophobia and racism towards Muslim citizens and residents of Europe might seem like a herculean task, the authors of the “Counter Islamophobia Kit” briefing paper say it is a necessity.

“A worsening environment of Islamophobia was identified with respect to media content, political discourse and experiences of discrimination indicating the new and increasingly acceptable hostility against Muslims in many spheres of everyday life,” the report warned.

European academics led by the University of Leeds, in conjunction with NGOs and activists, explored the various drivers of Islamophobia in eight European countries – the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Portugal – as well as the efforts to foster counter-narratives to Islamophobia in each country.

“The project has revealed the vast expansiveness of Islamophobia, the fact that it permeates so many elements of our lives and of society,” Amina Easat-Daas, project officer for the Counter Islamophobia Kit, told Middle East Eye.

“We want to challenge the narratives that exist, to contextualize them and emphasize their normalcy, their everyday nature, and also highlight the brilliant contributions many Muslims are making in society. “

Local variations of Islamophobia

While Islamophobia in most countries was strongly associated with the perception of Muslims constituting a “threat to security” and “a threat to local, national and European identity”, local culture and history has informed the way Islamophobia has been formulated.

While there is ample documentation of France’s instrumentalization of its national conception of laïcité – secularism – to target its Muslim citizens for being visibly unsecular, in Portugal, the history of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in the Middle Ages has fed local narratives of civilisational struggle and fears of a Muslim “invasion”.

In Greece, the report said, some Islamophobic discourses raised the spectre of Turkey using refugees to expand its control across the Aegean – as refugees and Muslims become conflated identities in the public psyche.

Meanwhile, in countries such as Hungary that have served as a transit point for many asylum seekers attempting to reach western Europe, the narrative of Muslim as potential terrorists remain strong, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban telling Germany’s Bild newspaper: “We don’t see these people as Muslim refugees. We see them as Muslim invaders.”

Yet the most publicised recent “terrorism” conviction in the country involved an asylum seeker prosecuted earlier this month for throwing stones at police officers.

Even in countries like the United Kingdom, which have a long history of diversity, long-standing Muslim populations find themselves the target of hatred in the wake of attacks claimed by Islamic State group.

There is an urgent need to recognize Islamophobia as a form of racism

– Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, German researcher 

“The UK used to pride itself in its diversity, but that discourse is no longer there,” said Arzu Merali, the head researcher for the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in the UK, during Wednesday’s conference, describing how a generalized discourse targeting Muslims in schools or streets also culminates in “targeted legislation” which solidifies “the idea of Muslims as non-citizens”.

“It sounds pretty dramatic, but this is the kind of scenario we are facing in the UK today,” Merali said.

“There is an urgent need to recognize Islamophobia as a form of racism,” Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, IHRC researcher in Germany said during Wednesday’s conference, pointing to “how easily Islamophobia moves between everyday life and politics” when Islamophobia “is not officially recognized as a form of discrimination”.

In Germany, Aguilar said, racist tropes have enforced the idea that “being a Muslim means being a problem”.

While Easat-Daas highlighted the differences between each country in the study, she expressed concern about France’s status as a “barometer” – and trailblazer – of Islamophobia in Europe.

“I worry that (France) is a potential leader, that it signposts that this is acceptable. Its laws set precedence, I worry that French policies set precedence,” she told MEE. “When you see the French ‘loi anti-niqab’ and how that then plays out in different framings, in Belgium first, and then further and further, I’m worried that it’s gaining credence and an image of legitimacy.”

Countering toxic narratives

In the face of mounting hateful discourse and actions promoted by public figures, media, and ordinary citizens, sometimes with deadly consequences, the Counter Islamophobia Toolkit highlights initiatives that seek to counter prevalent toxic narratives about Islam.

The report cast some doubts on the effectiveness of reactive condemnations of attacks committed by Muslim individuals and efforts to distance them from the broader Muslim community as still falling within a narrative of “securitisation” of Muslims in all aspects of their lives, and fostering the expectation that all Muslims must condemn any negative acts committed by one of their co-religionists.

Many efforts across the continent have sought to demystify Islam to non-Muslim European citizens, such as the Parle-moi d’Islam videos explaining aspects of the religion.

Muslims attend a Friday prayer on 23 September 2016 at the Budapest Mosque and headquarters of the Organisation of Muslims in Hungary. (AFP)

Key to combating Islamophobia, the report says, is the “normalization” of Muslims – showing them as individuals with the same lives and aspirations as others, as in the Human Library in the Czech Republic, and highlighting food, fashion and culture as points of human connection between Muslims and non-Muslims.

In some cases, approaches to fight Islamophobia might appear counter-intuitive – as in Greece, where some efforts actually leaned on prevailing Christianity in the Mediterranean country to promote “Conservative anti-nationalist narratives and Christian ecumenical ideals such as peace, hospitality and care towards the vulnerable, especially towards refugees”.

Part of the efforts to counter Islamophobia, Easat-Daas said, include recognizing the phenomenon as not simply exclusive to right-wing movements.

“I would argue that (Islamophobia) is not exclusive to the right wing, but rather something that you can see across the political spectrum,” she said. “It shouldn’t be acceptable political discourse to stigmatize or to speak on behalf of other people – which is often something we see in liberal Islamophobia.”

Legal shortfalls

While the burden of fighting against Islamophobia seems to mainly fall on the shoulders of civil society in Europe as hateful discourse has become further normalized in the political and governmental sphere, the report highlights the role played by the European legal system – and its shortfalls.

“There is limited engagement of European human rights law with the best legal practices to counter Islamophobia in individual EU member states,” the report reads. “As a result, the forms that both judicial intervention and legal measures, including positive measures, could take in order to effectively counter Islamophobia remain unclear.”

The report goes on to criticise the European Court of Human Rights for its “rigidity” in ruling on cases of alleged state Islamophobia which it said had shifted “the burden of proof away from the state and onto the applicants who should then prove that the restrictions against their right to freedom of religion are disproportionate”.

The brief nonetheless welcomed efforts by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in passing a number of non-binding resolutions analyzing and defining Islamophobia, highlighting it as a necessary step towards tackling the problem.

Islamophobia is a challenge to the continuation of a particular type of European democratic project, and that’s why I think it should be taken seriously, and not just in relation to the defense of Muslim communities, but in defense of the kind of world we want to live in

– Salman Sayyid, University of Leeds

The Parliamentary Assembly had been largely successful, it said in spelling out “different cultural, historical and socioeconomic elements that constitute Islamophobia”.

But it said there was a “striking contrast between the nuance and complexity of those soft-law instruments and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, where there is almost complete lack of references to Islamophobia and no distinctive legal response to the phenomenon”.

Sajjad Karim, a Conservative Party MEP representing northwest England, raised the alarm on Wednesday about Islamophobia across European nations, highlighting concerns that it had begun “seeping through to the European (Union) level” and could further worsen with the eventual election of more populists to the European Parliament in 2019 – which could lead to a EU Parliament “held ransom by those extremes”.

“Now we are in a fight, and in a matter of months from now… there is an issue of self-interest for every European,” Karim said.

Salman Sayyid, professor of social theory and decolonial thought at the University of Leeds, said during Wednesday’s conference that the fight against Islamophobia has a larger mandate than the protection of one specific religious community.

“Islamophobia is a challenge to the continuation of a particular type of European democratic project, and that’s why I think it should be taken seriously, and not just in relation to the defense of Muslim communities, but in defense of the kind of world we want to live in.”

Source: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/islamophobia-europe-uk-france-belgium-toolkit-islam-muslims-racism-670535899

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In the last week of June, political developments within Germany and the recent resurgence of the right in many countries in the continent led to migration taking the centre-stage at the European Summit meeting on June 28-29. The resulting agreement, more an attempt at mediating between the domestic compulsions of European powers rather than addressing the issue concretely, saw the onus being placed further on countries on the borders of Europe. This strategy has its own risks, analysts have pointed out.

This is even as the number of asylum applications made in the EU has declined from the peak of 1,322,800 in 2015 to 704,600 last year. In first quarter of this year, the number of first-time asylum applications further declined by 25% as compared to last year’s first quarter, amounting to a mere 257 applications per million inhabitants in the EU.

The sharpest decline in such border crossings can been seen from 2016 onwards, the year since when the EU has been outsourcing the task of stopping migrants to countries which serve as crucial transit points, such as Turkey and Libya. The violence used in the process of cracking down on refugees in such countries does not make media headlines.

Figures indicate that the refugee flow in the EU, which the union calls the “refugee crisis”, is at its lowest in the last three-and-a-half years, in the course of which there has been a 95% decline in irregular border crossings into the EU by refugees fleeing wars and violence in their countries that have been destabilized by Western intervention, in which various EU member states have played a crucial part.

Read More: Hundreds of Thousands Protest Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Policies

However, the domestic political crisis in Germany – where Angela Merkel’s coalition partner threatened the collapse of the government if stronger laws were not introduced and implemented to curb the inflow of migrants – led to the issue gaining unprecedented urgency ahead of the summit.

On the first day of the summit, the new populist right-wing government of Italy flexed its muscles, blocking all the joint decisions at the summit, including those on issues over which there appeared to be a consensus between member states. This was even before the discussion over migration that was scheduled over dinner that night.

It was clear that Italy was concerned that the discussions would not focus on the needs on the frontline states – where immigrants first enter Europe – but on their secondary movements, which is what led to disputes in Germany. This concern led it to virtually hold the summit at ransom, ensuring no progress could be made until the issues raised by it were addressed.

The press conference scheduled for later in the evening to present the agreements reached on that day had to be cancelled.

Finally, after a nine-hour long negotiation, in the course of which European Council President Donald Tusk presented multiple versions of the migration policy draft – which were discussed upon and rejected by France, Italy and the Visegrad group which includes Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic – an agreement was reached around 5 a.m.

With Italy insisting that the burden of hosting irregular migrants arriving at its shores must be shared, and Central European countries like Hungary and Czech Republic refusing any proposal of alloting quotas to member states in order to host migrants, the final agreement stipulated that those migrants rescued in EU waters, “should be taken charge of, on the basis of a shared effort, through the transfer in controlled centres set up in Member States, only on a voluntary basis..”

The EU would provide full support to members states which set up such control centres to undertake a “rapid and secure processing” in order to “distinguish between irregular migrants, who will be returned, and those in need of international protection, for whom the principle of solidarity would apply.”

However, the agreement – which calls on member states to share the task of setting up control centres, relocating and resettling the migrants on a “voluntary basis” – provides no information on what measures will be taken if a majority of the member states refuse to volunteer.

Strong anti-immigrant sentiments prevail in Italy, contributing to the wave on which a coalition partner in the current government rode to power. Meanwhile, Merkel was able to avert a government collapse in the last moment only by conceding the CSU’s demand for stronger measures to stop the entry of immigrants into the country. At the same time, the Central European countries are ruled by leaders who are rabidly anti-immigrant. In such a situation, it is unlikely that sufficient countries will volunteer to undertake the proposed measures.

The agreement also urges the EU countries to take “all necessary internal legislative and administrative measures” to curtail “secondary movements of asylum seekers between Member States”, i.e the movement from the country in which they first arrive in the EU to the country in which they intend to apply for asylum.

In the first quarter of this year, 34,400 or 26% of all the first-time asylum seekers made their applications in Germany, making it the destination where the highest number of asylum applications were filed. However, in terms of proportion to the country’s population, Germany, the largest economy in EU, had only 418 first time asylum applicants per million inhabitants in the country, which is higher than the EU average of 257 applicants per million, but significantly lower than 1,550 applications per million in Cyprus, 1,204 in Greece, 858 in Malta and 753 in Luxembourg. Nevertheless, 60% of the applications were rejected by Germany.

Read More: As European Powers Squabble, Migrants Struggle to Stay Afloat

As more and more countries take measures to close their borders to asylum seekers who are moving from one EU member state to another, pressure on frontline EU countries such as Italy and Greece is set to increase – an increase which is unlikely to be offset by ‘voluntary’ contributions of other member states. Nonetheless, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said after the conclusion of the summit that Italy was “no longer alone”.

Recently, Italy was roundly criticised for not allowing a ship which had rescued drowning migrants to dock at its ports, leaving them stranded in perilous seas for days. The agreement envisions no concrete measures to avoid such incidents, but only calls upon the European Council and Commission “to swiftly explore the concept of regional disembarkation platforms” where migrants rescued in the sea can be disembarked from ships.

TO OUTSOURCE THE DIRTY JOB

The more concrete measures outlined in the agreement focus not on addressing the issues faced by the migrants once they are in EU countries but on stopping them from being able to reach the EU, by paying money to countries outside the union. These include countries in Africa and the Middle East, where migrants can be stopped from crossing borders by use of force in violation of human rights and international law.

In order to choke the Eastern Mediterranean Route which Syrians have been taking to escape from the war, the agreement stresses on the need to “fully implement the EU-Turkey Statement, prevent new crossings from Turkey and bring the flows to a halt.”

“Syrian refugees attempting to cross into Turkey at unofficial crossing points are summarily pushed back into Syria and some asylum seekers and smugglers attempting the crossing have been shot dead or beaten by Turkish border guards,” a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Turkey stated last year.

This, however, was not the way Turkey had always been dealing with the refugee crisis. HRW’s 2015 report on Turkey stated: “A new asylum law, which went into effect in April 2014, for the first time, enshrines asylum and subsidiary protection as a matter of law, including provisions for legal aid, on unaccompanied children and on non-refoulement. It limits administrative detention of migrants pending deportation to six months (extended for another six months for noncooperation) with the stipulation that detention ordinarily should not be used for asylum seekers.” What followed was a series of diplomatic maneuvers by the EU and Turkey over the issue of migration.

The year Turkey passed the law, it was pulled up by the European Commission, which, in its annual report, expressed “serious concerns” about the government’s interference in the country’s judiciary and its crackdown on internet freedom. Multiple rulings were passed by the European Court of Human Rights against Turkey in 2014 after its new asylum law was put into effect. Turkey’s attempts to accede to the EU saw no progress.

The month after the new asylum law was introduced, the EU signed an agreement with Turkey which allowed the former to deport unauthorized Turkish citizens living in the EU back to Turkey. From 2017, the agreement allowed the EU to also deport to Turkey other irregular migrants who enter the EU through through the country.

By 2015, when Turkey emerged as the main transit route through which an increasing number of refugees arrived in Greece, the EU struck a deal with Turkey, requiring the latter to cub the flow of refugees into EU, in exchange for 3 billion euros, “the prospect of visa-free travel for its citizens in most EU countries and reinvigorated talks on EU membership,” HRW’s 2016 report pointed out.

Months after the deal was struck, in October that year, the European Commission President, urged the European parliament to stop raising issues regarding human rights violation in Turkey. “We face two possibilities. We can say that EU and the European institutions have outstanding issues with Turkey on human rights, press freedoms and so on.. We can harp on about that but where is that going to take us in our discussions with Turkey?”, he told the parliament, adding, “We know that there are shortcomings but we need to involve Turkey in our initiatives. We want to ensure that no more refugees come from Turkey into the European Union.”

The publication of European Commission’s annual report on human rights in Turkey was postponed until after the general elections were complete in November 2015, days after which summit meetings between EU and Turkey began, eventually culminating in the EU-Turkey statement on March 18 the following year.

In this statement – whose full implementation is called for by the agreement reached in the European Council meeting this year – the two parties declared that “the EU and Turkey today decided to end the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU.”

In order to do so, “Turkey will take any necessary measures to prevent new sea or land routes for illegal migration opening from Turkey to the EU, and will cooperate with neighbouring states as well as the EU to this effect,” and the EU, on its part, will deport back to Turkey all “new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands as from 20 March 2016”.

Since then, Turkey has imposed restrictions on the Syrian border to deny access to refugees, and has pushed thousands of asylum seekers, illegally crossing the border, back into the war-torn country from where they were escaping. Over the last three years, the number of refugees arriving in Europe through the Eastern Mediterranean Route has witnessed a 97% decline.

In the European Summit meeting, Merkel thanked Turkey for its role, and said, “We would all agree Turkey is doing a tremendous job.” The European Council has agreed to provide Turkey an additional 3 billion euros as a part of honouring the commitments made in the EU-Turkey statement, ostensibly to finance a “Facility for Refugees”.

Turkey is not the only country outside the EU to whom the task of curbing the flow of refugees has been outsourced. The EU has so far committed 237 million euros to Libya to rein in the flow of refugees. In February last year, EU leaders agreed to further train and equip the Libyan Coastguard. The agreement stipulates that the EU “will step up its support” for the Libyan Coastguard in order to choke the Central Mediterranean Route that those escaping from the political and economic turmoil in Sub-Saharan and North Africa take to enter Europe, mostly to Italy first, through Libya as the transit point.

Trained and equipped by EU, the “Libyan Coast Guards or Navy intercepted boats and returned the migrants and refugees back to land and into detention centers, often subjecting the migrants they intercepted to physical and verbal abuse.. Officials and militias held migrants and refugees in prolonged detention without judicial review and subjected them to poor conditions, including overcrowding and insufficient food. Guards and militia members subjected migrants and refugees to beatings, forced labor, and sexual violence,” HRW’s 2017 report stated.

The June 29 agreement of this year called upon vessels of EU member states plying the Mediterranean to “not obstruct operations of the Libyan Coastguard.” Other countries in the Sahel region of Africa will also receive additional support from the EU to crack down on the migrant flow.

Outsourcing the task of stopping refugees to countries where human rights violations committed in the process largely remains under the radar, is a policy that been tried and tested by the EU, and has successfully helped in reducing the irregular border crossing into the union by 95% since the October 2015 peak, as acknowledged in the agreement.

By promising to increase support for countries outside the union that are tasked with stopping the migrants from escaping war-torn countries into Europe, the EU is likely further reduce the flow of refugees in the region, by denying them an escape from the violence and anarchy that many countries in the region have been plunged into.

Source: https://www.newsclick.in/eus-solution-refugee-crisis-involves-outsourcing-responsibilities

The post EU’s Solution to ‘Refugee Crisis’ Involves Outsourcing Responsibilities first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.