Last week marked World Refugee week, a seven day campaign designed to raise awareness of the 15 and a half million refugees worldwide. Another 27 million individuals remain outside legal refugee status and yet remain internally displaced by conflict or disaster. Yet among the usual annual fundraisers, an urgency grows in the voices of the UNHCR and its fellow Refugee organisations. As seen in the recent Rio+20 Summit, refugees are not only being created through conflict, such as in Syria and Afghanistan, but also through global climate change. The problem is growing, and it is becoming deeply dependent on European politics.
A recently published UNHCR report flags the inevitable growth of an asylum seeking society around the world. Perhaps more importantly, its release highlights the necessity of European countries to reengage their politics and society with a non-discriminative refugee policy. This call from NGOs comes at a difficult time: the financial crisis of the Eurozone is has led to a clamping down in its policies towards irregular migration to an almost xenophobic level. With Greece pursuing plans of a five million Euro fence to guard its borders with Turkey, European management of the refugee question is panicked and inhuman. The result of a combination of a lack of European standardisations and economic downturns is growing discrimination and ill treatment of asylum seekers and refugees within European societies. Attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees determine these individuals as illegal migrants and social engagement with refugees as a humanitarian issue is at an all-time low.
Detention centres in Europe and the UK have gained growing negative attention from human rights organisations, who highlight that asylum seekers are escaping immediate danger to only be detained and treated inhumanely in refuge. In some brave cases asylum seeking torture victims are seeking legal action against UK border agency for unlawful detainment. As well as reflecting the disengagement of society with refugee rights these detainment centres highlight the costly mismanagement of the asylum process, not just to the individuals detained but to the country’s tax payers (In the UK detainment of around 226 days-as in the case above- costs £23,000 per individual).
It is also a common misconception of European society that industrialised European countries shoulder the balk of displaced people. The reality is that 80% of refugees live in developing countries, with Syria, Kenya, Pakistan and Iran being top hosts of refugees. The lack of solidarity and vast differences between European asylum seeker processes means refugee acceptance rates show great disparity and subjectivity. For example an Afghan asylum seeker has a 73% likelihood of acceptance in Sweden but only an 11% likelihood of acceptance in Greece. Not only does this encourage migrants of conflict and disaster to dodge the unreliability of the asylum seeker process all together, causing waves of undocumented immigration, but it also shrinks the asylum space. If this is to continue, asylum seekers and refugees will instead continue to flood developing countries where economies and infrastructure are even more unable to manage, agitating further economic and cultural divides.
At this time of drastic deliberation on the Eurozone’s future it is necessary for us to not forget the forty two million displaced individuals who are both a product and a dependent of European policy decisions. The European countries, along with the UK need to comprehend that the refugee question is an issue deeply linked to the Eurozone’s economic state and not merely a product of far-flung failed states. Mismanagement and the creation of a xenophobic attitude towards asylum migration must be addressed and standardisation brought back into line with the conditions set by the 1954 UN conference. If the Eurozone is to have an effective economic and political standing it needs to reengage with one of the globes greatest problems.
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