EUROPEAN LAWYERS AGAINST "SAFE COUNTRY" CONCEPT
About 3000 lawyers from 23 European countries have united in a network opposed to the ever more widespread practice of returning asylum seekers to so-called "safe third countries".
The participants of the "Safe Third Country Monitoring Project" are all members of ELENA (European Legal Network on Asylum). Each of them will register information regarding deported refugees. This information is to be stored in a central databank at the head office of ELENA in London and can be used in procedures in the various European countries.
There will be a particular contact person for each of the 23 countries covered by the network.
Each of these contact persons will receive a proxy form in all European languages. This document should enable a refugee lawyer in one country to act in court on behalf of a colleague in any other of the participating countries.
"Safe country" practice in Holland
The lawyers reject the very concept of "safe countries" that is now implemented by most western European states. For the time being, however, the assessment of which countries can be considered to be "safe", varies strongly from one state to another. The German list of safe countries includes all EU member states, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Poland. It seems probable that the Netherlands will use the same list. As soon as the Schengen Implementing Treaty enters in to force (in October, according to most recent information), the Netherlands will send asylum seekers who arrived via Germany and Belgium back to these neighbouring Schengen states. This is expected to result in a drastic decrease of the number of refugees allowed access to the asylum procedure in Holland.
With a view to this, special "flying brigades" of the Dutch military police have been carrying out random checks on aliens inside the country in areas close to the border since May. Within the first month, the "flying brigades" carried out checks on 33,164 people. Some 975 of them were immediately returned to Germany or Belgium. Thirty eight who demanded asylum were taken to one of the centres for asylum seekers.
According to two participants from the monitoring project, Roscam Abbing and René Bruins from the refugee department of the Dutch section of Amnesty International, the consequence of the ever more strict implementation of the "third country" principle is, that asylum seekers must "drop from the sky" in order to have the slightest chance to have their application examined in the Netherlands.
But getting on a plane is not that easy, particularly since the introduction of "pre-flight checks" aimed at preventing would-be refugees without a visa from leaving their country of origin. A visa can only be obtained at a Dutch embassy. But since the new Dutch law on foreigners went into effect in January this year, it is no longer possible to apply for asylum at an embassy.
Abbing and Bruins are not very optimistic with regard to the development of European policies on refugees, but they hope that the information gathered by the 3,000 lawyers participating in the monitoring project will help prevent summary deportation measures to third countries. The lawyers are preparing a report to be published in six months. The report is to contain the refugee lawyers' arguments against the "safe country" principle based on evaluation of the individual cases stored in the new register.
Source: Trouw, 9.6.94.