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A couple of years in the past, throughout an interview on the Pact on migration and asylum that the European Fee had simply offered, the Italian lawyer Anna Brambilla stated to me: “I suggest to discovered the TGMAFL: Transnational Group of Mutual Assist for Annoyed Attorneys”. Midway between a joke and a name to motion, the concept of Brambilla (who’s a member of the Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione, Asgi) was born of an statement: in a Europe that’s more and more hostile to exiled migrants, and confronted with the continued dismantling of the precise to asylum, defending the rights of migrants has turn into nearly mission unimaginable. As a career, it has been rendered nearly meaningless by political assaults on so-called “militant attorneys”.
The scenario has not improved since 2020. A way of powerlessness has grown amongst attorneys engaged on behalf of asylum seekers and others searching for to regularise their presence within the EU. European governments, of proper and left, are working to limit the rights of foreigners by altering legal guidelines or ignoring them, and trampling on elementary rights within the course of.
No follow is extra emblematic on this respect than that of refoulements. Whereas worldwide legislation prohibits the return of asylum-seekers to locations the place their lives could be in peril, this has actually turn into widespread follow in a number of member states, each on the EU’s exterior borders (Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Hungary, the checklist goes on) and at inside ones (reminiscent of between France and Italy). Lithuania has simply taken a serious step by passing a legislation legalising the follow, however many of the international locations that perform refoulements on the border accomplish that by knowingly breaking the legislation.
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On Lesbos, a Greek island some ten kilometres off the Turkish coast, refoulements are occurring “nearly on daily basis, typically a number of occasions a day, one thing the authorities systematically deny”, says Ozan Mirkan Balpetek, advocacy and communications officer on the Authorized Centre Lesvos (LCL), a Greek-registered non-profit organisation that gives free authorized help to migrants.
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