5,000 refugees waiting at the border in Idomeni, Greece, November 2015. Demotix/ Tasos Markou. All rights reserved.When I posted yesterday’s tweet on UNHCR’s involvement in managing the border crossings at the Greek-Macedonian border town of Idomeni, I expected an outcry. What I saw, and what I tried to document, was UNHCR lending support to the Macedonian military police, managing the refugee crowd away from the border back to the transit camp on the Greek side.
This was done in the context of a new policy started in Serbia on 17 November and followed by Macedonia a day later, according to which Macedonian authorities only allow Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi passport holders to cross the border into their country. A country, which presently almost all refugees pass through on their way to Europe but in which virtually no one wants to remain.
This then was UNHCR, the leading UN refugee protection agency, supporting the enforcement of border restrictions designed to implement a selective right to claim asylum based on nationality. The right to claim asylum, as outlined in the Refugee Convention of 1951, is both a universal and an individual right. As such, it is available to anyone irrespectively of nationality. UNHCR had become co-opted by border politics.
