The iron gates next to the windmills – Amnesty International Maastricht Students speak out on detention centres in the Netherlands

 

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”
Article 9, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Amnesty International Maastricht Students on February 8th hosted an awareness-raising event at Maastricht’s Kumulus theatre titled “Detention without crime in the Netherlands?- A refugee’s reality”.

The programme had been organised around Amnesty International’s June 2008 report on the conditions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in Dutch detention centres and featured debates with experts, the projection of a documentary, live music and a photography contest on the subject of “Freedom of movement”.

Many students, but also Maastrichters and international residents of varying ages filled the seats of the Kumulus theatre. Different voices and opinions shared the stage, especially during the first part of the programme when Annemarie Busser of the Dutch section of Amnesty International and Russian political refugee Ergeniya Shirokova discussed the implications of entering the Netherlands illegally.

Illegal crossings
Annemarie Busser has been working with individual cases of refugees in the Netherlands for some 20 years now. “The facts in the report are shocking,” she said, referring to the detention in 2007 in the Netherlands of about 20,000 illegal migrants and rejected asylum seekers. “It is a right for states to control their borders, but in the last few years we have seen more and more measures that tend to criminalize migration,” she pointed out.

“Criminalize” and “marginalize” are words that reappear several times in the report. They highlight Amnesty International’s concern about the conditions of detention, which are described as often being “in violation of human rights”.

“Detention of migrants should be an extreme measure, a last resort,” said Busser. “Authorities should demonstrate in each individual case that it’s a necessary and appropriate measure, a proportionate measure, and that there are no other possible alternatives.”

She underlined the already difficult personal situation of the people trying to enter the Netherlands, and how seclusion may add new traumas to pre-existing ones. “Amnesty’s main worry,” she said, “is that this is inflicted on people whose only guilt is crossing a border. There is no reason to base the detention regime on the same system as the one used for people who have been convicted for a crime. This regime unnecesserarily restricts the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants, and it is a violation in itself”.

Russian political refugee Ergeniya Shirokova shared her personal experience of entering the Netherlands. She underwent an accelerated asylum seeking procedure, after which she was sent to a “reception centre” run by the Central Reception Organisation for Asylum Seekers (COA). She was granted a political refugee status and left a year later.

“One of the reasons why I was accepted as a refugee and wasn’t sent for detention was that I didn’t use the services of people smugglers,” she said.

Shirokova observed however that “many asylum applicants try to reach Dutch soil by any means, not always legal”.

“They listen to so-called kind people who give kind advice” and are easy prey for smugglers.

She did not justify their actions: “Illegal crossing of the border is, after all, a crime, even if people who do it are not aware of it”. Yet she agreed with Busser’s critical take on the application of detention: “It is really terrible that people who in fact have committed no crimes have to be detained”, she said, somewhat contradicting herself. Her voice stood out in the crowd, but her position was not always clear.

There was a high level of attention in the audience. We come across migrants every day, and Europe’s image as a multicultural society is a reality. Back home in Italy I was confronted with nearly daily news about illegal arrivals on the island of Lampedusa. There, human rights didn’t seem to be on the priority agenda. In the Netherlands however, people appear to be more concerned about the need to respect such rights when dealing with migrants, even irregular ones.

The Amnesty report urges the Dutch government to find “alternative measures to detention”, yet the only explicit alternative it seems to offer is “reporting requirements”, in the form of periodical reports to a local authority (page 53). Busser added however that an Amnesty report on the topic is in the making. “Solutions might not be immediate,” she said. “Ideas are welcome” .

What about human rights?
The programme continued with a documentary by independent producer Journeyman Pictures focusing on Dutch detention centres and in particular the expulsion centre in Schiphol where a fire broke out in October 2005, killing 11 and wounding 15 detainees.

AIMS projected two statements on the screen, asking the public to agree or disagree by showing either a green or a red card. Then a panel of experts consisting of Amnesty International’s Annemarie Busser, UM Professor of International Law Theo Van Bowen and Professor of Arts and Social Sciences René Gabriëls, gave some insights related to the statements, and the audience joined in.

When the statement “All migrants should get temporary working permit after having resided illegally or legally in the Netherlands for a year” popped up on the screen, the number of green cards heavily outweighed the red ones. Van Boven however invited the audience to be more cautious: “A question we should ask ourselves is: As long as we don’t have a European policy on migration and on the issue of asylum, what would be the effect of introducing this type of legislation in the Netherlands only? Shouldn’t we do this together with the other EU member countries?”

“But these questions do not seem to be on the political agenda for the near future,” he said.

Moreover, Van Boven suggested that such legislation could be a double-edged sword: “With 27 members taking part in the bargaining, there’s the risk of ending up with the lowest common denominators, because every country can slow down the process or reject more general options.” He pointed out that European standards on migration might also be harsher than the ones enforced in individual countries.

Gabriëls on the other hand endorsed the statement, and added that the adjective “temporary” should be removed. In his view, the topic needs to be considered within a larger perspective: “When you discuss this type of issue, you should always link all the different human rights, for example socio-economic human rights to civil human rights”. “But I am very pessimistic about European policies,” he added.

Communitarian measures triggered more discussion among members of the audience, shifting the topic to the policies designed to contain the flow of migrants. Criticisms targeted the EU’s neighbourhood policy, which makes it possible for a number of “neighbouring” countries to receive EU funding when certain economical and political standards are met.

German Student Hanna Israel said: “What I can see from it right now is just that the EU is putting money into the reinforcement of the African border, so that we don’t have to deal with immigrants who are coming to the European borders.” She didn’t see the policy as a means of cooperation but rather as a way of externalizing Europe’s problems and she didn’t think it would help solve those in the countries migrants come from.

Some speakers shared her critical opinion. “I understand that European money goes into detention centres abroad, to lock up those who seek to leave the country,” said Van Boven “Putting that burden over there, that is, in my view, not a right use of development aid”. Gabriëls went further, suggesting that the only way to combat such policies would be to mobilise public opinion, and use what he called “the power of the powerless”.

The second statement on the screen read: “Illegal migrants should not receive any schooling while they are in detention, because they are not supposed to join our society anyway”.

Within seconds, a wave of red cards filled the theatre. Even though there was disagreement on the type of schooling, the audience clearly agreed that education is a human right for every individual under any condition.

Many people in the Netherlands are claiming that the welcoming attitude which characterized the Dutch people in the 1960’s and 70’s is fading, and that right-wing ideologies have become more influential. Gabriëls sees this as the result of bigger changes: “In the course of the globalization process, we see a nationalist reaction that has to do with the fact that some parts of the population feel insecure”.

Nevertheless, I believe that engagement for human rights and cooperation is still strong, just as the well-known Dutch openness. One wouldn’t expect otherwise among Amnesty’s activists, but my experience in the streets has not been very different. People still want migrants, legal or not, to be treated humanely, and not be put in confinement. Bigger changes may be at work, yet I think intolerance is more blatant elsewhere in the EU.

AIMS’s event did not serve answers on a silver plate, but it did show that criminalization and marginalization are not the ones the Netherlands and Europe at large should be resorting to.

By Sofia Tussis

Sofia Tussis is an Italian student specializing in European Studies at Maastricht University.

Amnesty International’s Annemarie Busser read the following testimony by a former asylum seeker from Burundi named Wazo in the June 2008 Amnesty report on the conditions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in Dutch detention centres.

Wazo’s asylum request in the Netherlands was rejected in the accelerated procedure. He stayed 10 months in detention. Later on he was recognized as a convention refugee.

“ʽA very normal question in the daily Dutch life for migrants or refugees is: for how long have you been in the Netherlands? I ask myself this question: for how long really? How do I have to classify the ten months in detention?

It is good to bury the past but that is not always easy. I always try to forget those ten months I spent in detention but they cannot go off my mind. The impact of the detention on me as a person, as a human, as a refugee is so destructive that it is practically impossible to explain. On one hand I do not have psychological problems because I try to do whatever I can to delete those ten months from my memory, I do my daily things, I study and I live my life. On the other hand, let me say that, my psychological problem due to the detention is enormous and complex. Until now I regularly have nightmares, the four walls of the cell in which I spent those months, I see them when I am sleeping. My daily life is also connected to those days, the days that I was excluded from the society, isolated from documented citizens.

I see injustice everyday and the answer to myself is that since those days that I did not have the right to freedom, I will never enjoy it again. This might sound strange, but it is true that every time I feel that a teacher in my class is not seeing me as a good student, the answer to myself is: ʽVoila, because I am a refugee, some men and women here do not care about me, they do not want me here.ʼ I simply mean that the biggest influence of the detention on my personality is that I have lost trust in the public, in the government.

The men and women I met in detention became my family, my friends, though most of them I will never see again in this life. That is the other inhuman side of the detention of refugees. We were there for uncommitted crimes, and till now we do not understand why. We were forced to make a new society of the excluded ones and we supported each other. Sometimes I dream about our funny moments we spent playing, joking and laughing. But we always knew that we had to separate again as if we did not deserve to belong to a family. I miss those co-detainees really, and it is painful that we will never meet again. I feel like visiting those detention centres now, but who is there to recognize me, what can I do there? It is a place for nobody. It is a place in which you live, then you leave. Your new family and friends leave, and it becomes your history that you can never visit again. You are left with just painful memories.ʼ

Links:

• AIMS
• Kumulus
• Amnesty International Report, June 2008: The detention of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers
• Universal declaration of Human Rights
• Background information in English about migrant detention centres in the Netherlands and Europe
• List of detention centres in the Netherlands
• Article: European Parliament discusses detention centres for asylum seekers, 5 February 2009
• Article: The EU moves toward the creation of a Support Office in the field of asylum management, 18 February 2009
• Video clip: Schiphol detention centre, July 2008
• Video clip: Dutch detention policy, August 2007, documentary by Journeyman Pictures

Photographs by Sofia Tussis and Catalina Goanta