Catherine Bebbington for UK Parliament/Flickr. Creative Commons.
The legislative process isn't very exciting. In the UK, as in many other countries, it involves long documents, long meetings in parliamentary committees, and long debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords. The refugee crisis currently taking place in Europe, on the other hand, is something akin to exciting. It’s moving, horrifying, distressing, urgent. The images that face us on a daily basis are genuinely dystopian—squalid refugee camps in the heart of Europe, dead children washing up on beaches, police tear gassing people fleeing a war zone. There is something everybody can do about this, activities that can contribute to the humanitarian effort and help to relieve the crisis. And so we see a large scale movement of people in the UK and across Europe donating clothes, toiletries, food, and volunteering their time under the banner #refugeeswelcome.
The current refugee crisis in the Middle East is of course a crisis of displacement, but the fact that it has now become a crisis within Europe is largely due to a succession of laws that have been passed in European states over the past ten to fifteen years. These laws have made it almost impossible to reach Europe ‘legally’ to seek asylum. Why do we need negotiations on burden sharing? Why are the southern and eastern nation states receiving so many refugees while countries like the UK are not? Because laws have been passed to prevent people from boarding a plane without the correct travel documents. While the right to cross international borders without a passport or visa is enshrined in international law because it is a fundamental necessity for refugees to get to safety, this practice has been made illegal in most western states. The responsibility for checking papers has been passed to airline staff, whose failure to prevent asylum seekers from arriving in a destination country incurs a fine.
