José Luis Pardo: "Risking one's life to seek a better future is no crime"
"Saving lives at sea is an international obligation, not an option", said the Ambassador-at-Large for Migration Affairs, José Luis Pardo, at the start of a day in which the European responsibility for the right to protect migrants in the Mediterranean was debated. This debate took place in a context strongly marked by the waves of refugees and migrants seeking asylum and international protection, in order to try to carve out a future for themselves.
In this way, the University of Nebrija organised, under the guidance of Carlos Espaliú, PhD in International Law, and Sonia Boulos, PhD in Legal Sciences, an event in which the aim was to expose the conditions faced daily by those migrants who leave their countries behind due to the chaotic situation in which they find themselves, and to seek real solutions to eradicate this situation.
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and UNHCR, so far this year, around 190 people have died while crossing the Mediterranean in search of a better future. This is an average of almost three deaths per day. More often than not, migrants from the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa risk their lives to try to reach Europe and leave behind a past of poverty and ruin. In addition, the chaotic situations in which they find themselves often lead them to fall into the hands of criminal networks. In this sense, Pardo stressed that "it is a moral duty to fight crime", as well as to exercise migration policies that are focused on international cooperation.
In this sense, an appeal was made for the promotion of legal migration that is responsible for protecting and preventing these people from putting their lives in danger. Similarly, Pardo denounced the fact that the boats do not comply with sufficient safety measures.
On the other hand, Juan Manuel Goig, a professor of law, criticised the EU's measures in this area as "a story of failure". For the professor, the problem lies in the fact that there has been a "misconception of the issue on the part of the European Union". Following this line, the EU has been characterised by carrying out an "instrumental, police and border" policy that has not focused on the immigrant. This has led to the stigmatisation of immigrants if they are in an illegal situation, directly linking this type of immigration with terrorism. Similarly, Goig criticised the fact that on many occasions police and security actions are "dubious in their form".
This link with terrorism has led governments to link terrorist acts committed in Europe with immigration. In response, France has tightened its borders, Belgium has restricted economic support for the immigrant population and Denmark has tightened its immigration policy even further. In addition to this, Turkey's immigration agreement agreed in 2016 "has violated all rights in immigration policy, betraying European values".
In this regard, for the jurist, there is a gap between the European means and the objective. The European Commission for Migration and Asylum highlights the need to ensure that all EU countries fully implement the Common European Asylum System, as well as to guarantee the functioning of the Shengen area. However, Europe has tightened its borders, reinforcing FRONTEX, and there has been a substantial increase in European political parties whose policy lines include clearly xenophobic policies.
An example of this was the ratification of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which was not supported by several European countries. The Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjaártó, rejected joining the pact because "Hungary could never accept such a partisan, biased and pro-migration document. Migration is a dangerous phenomenon! On the other hand, Poland, the United States, the Czech Republic and Israel opposed the pact, while Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia and Romania abstained from voting.
"No matter how many fences there are, they have the need and the right to find a better future", said journalist Javier Fernández Arribas, director of Atalayar, during the event. In this sense, Arribas agreed with the words of the other moderators, defending the need to "implement a controlled immigration policy" by providing more resources, apart from military resources, in order to achieve security, given that "the stability of the Mediterranean is the stability of Europe". To this end, he stressed the need to design a different strategy that aims to carry out an intervention on a different scale and with different objectives.
Likewise, the journalist called on the media, stressing the importance of the media in dealing with information related to migratory movements, as well as terrorist attacks, in order to avoid the "pull effect". In this line, he defended "the commitment to inform without being yellow", as well as giving them a dimension of human beings and not of figures. The fact of providing figures instead of names and surnames means that the population reading the news becomes insensitive to these events, as they are unable to empathise. Finally, Arribas stressed that "beyond policies, one of the issues is to prevent these people from having to leave their countries".
Ousman Umar is another of the voices that spoke during the event, providing a more direct perspective, as Umar was a victim of two mafias on his long journey to try to reach European soil. On his first journey from Ghana to the Sahara, he was abandoned with his companions in the middle of the desert for 21 days, "Only 6 out of 46 of us reached our destination". Ousman fell back into a mafia that gave them the wooden planks to build their own boats. During this second leg, more than 300 people lost their lives.
Umar managed to reach the Canary Islands as a minor and since then he has had the opportunity to study motivated by curiosity and the desire to not let other people like him fall into criminal networks, as well as to give a voice to his peers who did not make it. Now Ousman Umar has a degree in Public Relations and Marketing and a Master's degree in International Cooperation, as well as being the director of the NGO NASCO Feeding Minds, which provides the opportunity to give Ghanaian children a digital education.
Another speaker was Jesuit Father Josep Buades Fuster. Father Buades spoke about the work of the Jesuit service to migrants that they carry out in the area and denounced the "systematic beatings by Morocco against the migrant population". In the same way, he criticised the fact that the sub-Saharan population is directly forbidden to pass through. For the Jesuit, "there is a lack of real political will, there is a lack of commitment and will".
Another of the aspects that have driven the increase in migration is the impact that natural disasters are having on these movements. Researcher Beatriz Felipe Pérez has linked part of the migration to natural disasters, storms and droughts. In this respect, Pérez denounced the fact that this climate migration has "a greater impact on women and girls, as they have less access to resources and less participation in public life". She also stated that they suffer higher levels of violence and many of them end up as victims of sexual exploitation. One of the problems related to climate migration is that it has no legal framework, so there is a legal vacuum that can defend the victims of these natural disasters.
In 2020, 945 people died or went missing in the Mediterranean, with 132 people disappearing on the route to Spain and 720 on the central Mediterranean route. Since the outbreak of the Syrian war, the waves of refugees and migrants in search of a better life have multiplied in recent years.The challenge now is to cope with a situation, exacerbated by the ongoing conflicts in Central Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, where thousands of civilians are suffering the direct consequences of the fighting and are forced to flee their homes.
Everyone has the right to want to seek other ways of life by leaving their countries and customs behind, but it should be from a perspective of equality in which migratory movements are motivated by the search for other opportunities and not by fleeing war, poverty and hunger. The challenge now is to enforce European measures through the right tools, as well as to motivate migrants not to leave their countries, helping to solve the extreme situations in which they live so that their departures are not motivated because their lives are in danger.
