The EU Commission needs to satisfy both a majority in the European Parliament and a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers.
A thoughtful analysis should deconstruct narratives portraying migrants as a ‘weapon’ and identify them for what they are: people looking for international protection or, at most, better living conditions.
Humanitarian aid has become sidelined for a political agenda – the EU-Turkey deal – something that should be unacceptable for the EU: “humanitarian aid should be neutral, impartial.”
The collapse of the Mediterranean neighbourhood, once Europe’s success story, is the casualty of both terror and the financial crisis. It threatens to transform mare nostrum into a moat.
The statement by Nils Muiznieks, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
The EU-Turkey refugee deal is just the latest effort of EU members trying to keep refugees out. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate on the future of refugee protection.
Who will think of the EU as a global actor with normative power, now that it finds itself in the role of rubberstamping and in fact facilitating Turkey's slide into the abyss?
Europe needs to show that it actually cares about the cornerstones of democracy by putting pressure on Ankara to restore the free flow of information and ideas.
Erdogan is not doing this just for the money. Turkey is legitimately concerned about its security situation and needs European and American help to resolve it.
It is at once an informal encampment of makeshift shelters; a town under construction, with shops, restaurants and schools; and, a space subject to institutional violence, at risk of imminent destruction.
The hotspot works as a preemptive frontier, with the double goal of blocking migrants at Europe’s southern borders, and simultaneously impeding the highest number possible of refugees from claiming asylum.
The ‘hotspot’ system for migrants remains an experiment, but it entails the implementation at the national level of human-rights-violating policies elaborated at the EU level.
