DOCUMENTS AND PUBLICATIONS
Die Grenze - Flüchtlingsjagd in Schengenland, publ. by Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration, Niedersächsischer Flüchtlingsrat e.V. (FFM), and PRO ASYL, ISSN 1433-448 H 43527, Berlin, July 1998, 210 pages, available in German only.
Nobody is probably better informed on the new practices of deterrence and control at the EU's best protected border - Germany's eastern border with Poland and the Czech Republic - than the researchers of the Berlin-based research centre FFM. In this publication, FFM draws a differentiated and very topical picture of the brutality and violence facing forced migrants trying to overcome the new Iron Curtain separating "Schengenland" from Eastern Europe. The first chapter relates the experiences of migrants and refugees, many of whom get stranded in Ukraine and Belarus on their way to Western Europe. The second chapter deals with the increasing influence of German police authorities in Poland against the background of this country's application for EU membership. The third chapter describes the difficulties encountered by the Polish authorities in implementing German methods of policing in a country whose population continues to distrust both the Germans and its own police force. Informal cross-border cooperation between police authorities seems to be the governments' answer to these German-Polish disparities. The fourth chapter is about the development of Schengen methods of border control - the high-tech re-armament of the border line, the use of new concepts of overall search behind the borders, the involvement of the local population in the hunt on immigrants, and the criminalisation of "migrant smugglers". The fifth chapter deals with the specific practice of the Brandenburg refugee and deportation administration in the context of everyday racism.
The brochure is grim but necessary reading for anybody who wants to know how EU and Schengen policies in the fields of asylum, immigration and policing affect not only the targeted migrants but society as a whole.
Available from: FFM, Gneisenaustrasse 2a, D-10961 Berlin, price DM 8 (without postage).Zehn Jahre grenzüberschreitende Kurdenverfolgung, Eberhard Schultz, editor; with contributions from R.B. Ahues, H. Branscheid, R. Gössner, F. Grützmacher, U. Jelpke, M. Morres and K. Yilmaz; ISBN 3-926922-33-8; GNN Verlag, Cologne, September 1998, 124 p., in German; price 12 DM (without postage).
In the last 10 years, few items have influenced "internal security" policies more than the question of the Kurds and the PKK. After years of massive clamp-downs on Kurdish exiles, the situation has recently calmed down, as the German government and the PKK engaged in a process of "dialogue and de-escalation". Yet, the recent arrival of PKK leader Öcalan in Italy and the international controversy it created are proof enough that the Kurdish problem and its underlying causes remain to be solved.
As one of the leading defence attorneys in the infamous "anti-terrorist" German mass-trials of PKK supporters, Eberhard Shultz takes stock of Germany's and Western Europe's handling of the "Kurdish problem", both at home, on the justice and police level, and in the field of foreign policy.
Police, Politique et Justice au Bord du Futur - Mélanges pour et avec Lode Van Outrive, ed: Yves Cartuyvels, Françoise Digneffe, Alvaro Pires, Philippe Robert; contributors: F. Acosta, J-P. Brodeur, Y. Cartuyvels, M. L. Cesoni, Ch. Debuyst, M. Deflem, F. Digneffe, C. Faugeron, P. Hebberecht; L. Kulsman, F. Hutsebaut, D. Kaminski, G. Kellens, D. Laberge, P. landreville, P. Lascoumes, R. Lévy, G. Marx, C. Parent, A. Pires, P. Ronsaers, Ph. Robert, R. Roth, F. Tulkens, M. van de Kerchove, L. Van Outrive, R. Van Swaaningen, R. Zauberman; ISBN 2-7384-6716-4, L'Harmattan/Déviance et Société, Paris, 1998, 392 p. (mainly in French, with some contributions in English).
Lode Van Outrive, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), is one of Europe's leading experts on police research and an outstanding scholar in the field of criminal sociology. At the occasion of his retirement around thirty European and North American experts dialogued with him on some of the main issues preoccupying crime study on the eve of the year 2000. Should one speak of "problem-situations" rather than of crime? How will penal norms develop in the medium term? How can the long neglected study of white-collar criminality be relaunched? Which changes are affecting the police and their role in security policies?
These are some of the questions broached in this stimulating book.