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Written by Dr. Binoy Kampmark.
This has been a fantasy of Danish governments for some time. There have been gazes of admiration towards countries like Australia, where processing refugees and asylum-seekers is a task offloaded, with cash incentives, to third countries (Papua New Guinea and Nauru come to mind). Danish politicians, notably a good number among the Social Democrats, have dreamed about doing the same to countries in Africa, returning to that customary pattern of making poorer states undertake onerous burdens best undertaken by more affluent states.
The government of Mette Frederiksen has now secured amendments to the Danish Aliens Act that authorises the transfer of asylum seekers to other countries as their applications are being processed. The measure was secured on June 3 by a vote of 70 to 24, though critics must surely look at the absence of 85 MPs as telling. The measure is not automatic: the Danish government will have to secure (or bribe) the trust of third party states to assume their share.
Government spokesman Rasmus Stoklund left few doubts as to what the new law entailed. “If you apply for asylum in Denmark, you know that you will be sent back to a country outside Europe, and therefore we hope that people stop seeking asylum in Denmark.”
Stoklund’s language of warning evokes parallels with Australia’s own campaign of discouragement, marked by a highly-budgeted effort featuring such savage products as No Way. You Will Not Make Australia Home. In the video, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, then chief of Australia’s effort to repel naval arrivals known as Operation Sovereign Borders, is stern in threatening that “if you travel by boat without a visa you will never make Australia home”. Other delights involve a graphic novel, translated into 18 different languages, promising trauma and suffering to those who end up in a detention centre in the Pacific, and the feature film Journey, where an Iranian mother and her child seek sanctuary in Australia. The Danish propaganda arm will have some catching up to do.
Who then, are the third country candidates? Denmark already has a memorandum of understanding with the Rwandan government that covers migration, asylum, return and repatriation. Its purpose is to target an asylum system which supposedly gives incentives to “children, women and women to embark on dangerous journeys along migratory routes, while human traffickers earn fortunes”. When it was made, Amnesty International’s Europe Director, Nils Muižnieks could see the writing on the wall, calling it “unconscionable” and even “potentially unlawful”. But for Rwanda, just as it is with Pacific island states such as Nauru, money is to be made. Such countries effectively replace demonised people smugglers as approved traffickers and middlemen.
The response to the legislation from those in the business of advocating for refugees and the right to asylum has been uniform in curtness and distress. Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, voiced strong opposition to “efforts that seek to externalise or outsource asylum and international protection obligations to other countries.”
UNHCR spokesman Babar Balloch could only make the relevant point that the legislation ran “counter to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention”. Moves to externalise “asylum processing and protecting of refugees to a third country… seriously risk setting in motion a process of gradual erosion of the international protection system, which has withstood the test of time over the last 70 years”.
Balloch is evidently not as attentive as he thinks: those wishing to externalise such obligations have well and truly set this train in motion. The 2018 EU summit went so far as to debate the building of offshore processing centres in Morocco, Algeria and Libya to plug arrival routes via the Mediterranean. The UK government is also toying with the idea of an offshore asylum system.
Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Division distils the relevant principle being sacrificed. “By sending people to a third country, what you are essentially doing is taking what is a legal right and making it a discretionary political choice.” It is an increasingly attractive, if grotesque policy, for wealthier countries with little appetite to share the burdens of sharing the processing claims under the UNHCR’s Global Compact on Refugees.
Unfortunately for Frelkick and their like, the Danish government is proving derivatively consistent. It has been opting out of the European asylum system since the 2000s, doing its bit to fragment an already incoherent approach in the bloc. The centre right government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, just by way of example, was proud to reduce the number of asylum seekers and those wishing to settle in Denmark. In 2004, 1,607 people were granted asylum compared to 6,263 three years prior.
The approach of the current government is to negate the very right to seeking asylum in Denmark, aided by third countries. And there is not much left to do, given that the country received a mere 1,515 asylum applications in 2020, its lowest in two decades. Of those, 601 were granted permits to stay.
Lurking, as it always does in these situations, is the Australian example. The right to asylum is vanishing before the efforts of bureaucrats and border closing populists. The UN Refugee Convention, like other documents speaking to freedoms and rights, is becoming a doomed relic.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Danes like to support ‘oppressed’ terrorists in Asia and Africa, but they don’t like them in Denmark. Nazis as always, just more gay. Hopefully, Jens african husband won’t be send back to Rwanda.
The ‘right to asylum’ started as protection for very few politically persecuted people. Then the asylum lobby extended it to pretty much anybody from the third world who wanted to emigrate to a first world country. Now we have come full circle and target countries like Denmark abolish this much abused ‘right’ as a defensive measure against replacement migration by millions and millions of Africans each year. This is just common sense and was inevitable. The right to asylum should have stayed the way it started: A right for journalists, opposition politicians and other people targeted by foreign governments.
Its a political tool. First we bomb their countries and state institutions, then we invite selected ones to Western countries to social engineering. To destroy their own traditions by teaching them gay marriage, separation of family members, rights to abortion, minority rights fights, bad gramma and synthetic words. Neo-colonialism and cultural warfare.
Excellent observation.
So why don’t they want their White Helmet cuties living in Denmark? The irony, paying the human trafficker, for access to Europe and then finding yourself in a concentration camp in Africa, waiting for the paperwork to go through.
If Denmark supports the White Helmets and the anti Assad groups then why would Syrians want to find refuge there?
How many White Helmet Members are Syrian and how many from all parts of the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan? How much have May Day Rescue handed over to the White Helmets and what do they get in return?
I know a case of some Iraqis with refugee status promised asylum in Denmark. Travelling through Europe and finally into Denmark they were placed in a camp and told they could not get asylum in Denmark. Waiting in a camp in vain in 6 month they wanted to go back to Iraq, the Danish Authorities panicked and told them they could not get out of Denmark. Not get in and not get out. Waiting 6 month more in the camp they asked for school for their children, the Danish Authorities said no, and gave them psych medicine instead, for depression an stress. Waiting 6 month more with maltreated suicidal and stressed children, when the last thing they wanted in this world was to get asylum in Denmark, they were finally forced an asylum in Denmark. Accommodated in Denmark but surveyed by the social Authorities, they were then met with road directions signs on the street “2123 km to Bagdad”. I am told its some academic desk business concept called “stress tactic”. To pacify, give the refugees low self confidence and avoid revenge. What a world.
Did not realize that SF was so pro-immigration/asylum in the West. Wow. Would you want the same in Russia?
Actually Russia is the country with most annual refugees in the world. Many from Ukraine. From what I have heard Russia is doing quite a simple good job. The refugee procedure is simple, short termed. Finally acquitted the refugee get a home/apartment somewhere where they are needed, papers to healthcare, and then a job. Nothing fancy but sufficient to start and live a life.
I fully understand Denmark. They see it every day, what problems Sweden got by allowing asylum seekers, which were in reality not entitled to asylum, into the country. Sweden got problems like war torn countries, e.g. the highest rate of explosives based criminal incidents (hand grenades and such stuff) and criminality by foreigners (gang crime), which are not to be talked about. As Malmö is one of these hot spots in Sweden, Denmark and its population can feel the heat, as it is just over the bridge from Copenhagen roughly 15 Kilometers away. Development in Denmark was similar to Sweden, but finally Danish politicians came to reason and stopped that nonsens.
There’s no right to asylum in your preferred social welfare system. Asylum is in the next safe country. Why would the most densely populated countries in the world receive million of economic migrants from the other end of the world.
I could write much, but, the suffering of the immigrants involved aside, I’ll leave it at this:
1) It’s a trick to get the Europeans conformable with the wholesale shipping off of people to “processing” centers. Next will be “workcamps” for those citizens not aligned with the the Jews’ pol and crat tools installed over them. “First they came for the immigrants”
2) Part of the plan. Look up the Jew Barbara Spectre’s comments on the Jews’ real plan for the use of “immigrants” to Europe. Immigrants often fleeing turmoil and wars produced by the Jews and their tools.
So many below are confused as to what is really going on. It is clear for we Jew-wise; There is no confusion.
The Jews instigate via their several wardogs turmoils and wars all around the world, but especially in the lands the Jews say is their “Greater Israel.” The Jews get their pol and crat tools in their European and US Tyrannies to permit the refugees from said turmoils and wars to immigrate–seek refuge. Then once the immigrants are in country, they pull the rug our from under them so they can be used as a distraction and/or weapon against the native born* and so as to use the immigrants as slaves and political serfs.
This is exactly what is being done with Latinos, albeit at a much slow pace, in America.
*Notice the use of these immigrants/refugees as a means to get the native born to agree to the wholesale shipping of people off to “processing” centers.
Seems you hit the nail on the head. If the people in those countries don’t want more ‘immigrants’ (for god’s sake do not call them refugees, right?), maybe they should be as adamant that their governments get out of those countries business. I can’t remember the last time anyone in the US demonstrated about the US government reining in their many coups in South America or Central America. US corporations, with the US gov as back-up, (as with EU countries) demand poverty in those countries and subservience, as well as owning their resources. The last real demonstrations I saw was over Palestine. Yet we’re about to gift Israel another $B for new missiles for Iron Dome, while the Palestinians might get a million or two. All those detention centers people in the US keep talking about? Guess who they’re for?…sooner or later.