Adbulrahman Idris from Darfour, Sudan, crossed the Sahara to arrive in Libya. November, 2017. SOPA/Press Association. All rights reserved.
In an attempt to save her government and placate German interior minister and leader of the conservative party of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, Angela Merkel has agreed to plans to erect extrajudicial spaces called “transit zones” at the border to Austria. In accordance with Seehofer’s demands for unilateral actions, the measure seeks to reject refugees that have already registered for an asylum application in other EU countries.
Learning from experience
Yet, we know from experience that unilateral actions seldom have unilateral consequences. We have learned this lesson when Hungary sealed its borders in September 2015 by erecting razor wire fences, deploying special police forces to patrol the borders to Serbia and established just those transit zones that the German government now seeks to emulate.
