This has been a fantasy of Danish governments for some time.\u00a0 There have been gazes of admiration towards countries like Australia, where processing refugees and asylum-seekers is a task offloaded, with cash incentives, to third countries (Papua New Guinea and Nauru come to mind).\u00a0 Danish politicians, notably a good number among the Social Democrats, have dreamed about doing the same to countries in Africa, returning to that customary pattern of making poorer states undertake onerous burdens best undertaken by more affluent states.<\/p>\n
The government of Mette Frederiksen has now secured amendments to the Danish Aliens Act that authorises the transfer of asylum seekers to other countries as their applications are being processed.\u00a0 The measure was secured<\/a> on June 3 by a vote of 70 to 24, though critics must surely look at the absence of 85 MPs as telling.\u00a0 The measure is not automatic: the Danish government will have to secure (or bribe) the trust of third party states to assume their share.<\/p>\n Government spokesman Rasmus Stoklund left few doubts<\/a> as to what the new law entailed.\u00a0 \u201cIf you apply for asylum in Denmark, you know that you will be sent back to a country outside Europe, and therefore we hope that people stop seeking asylum in Denmark.\u201d<\/p>\n Stoklund\u2019s language of warning evokes parallels with Australia\u2019s own campaign of discouragement, marked by a highly-budgeted effort featuring such savage products as No Way.\u00a0 You Will Not Make Australia Home<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 In the video, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, then chief of Australia\u2019s effort to repel naval arrivals known as Operation Sovereign Borders, is stern in threatening that \u201cif you travel by boat without a visa you will never make Australia home\u201d.\u00a0 Other delights involve a graphic novel<\/a>, translated into 18 different languages, promising trauma and suffering to those who end up in a detention centre in the Pacific, and the feature film Journey<\/em>, where an Iranian mother and her child seek sanctuary in Australia.\u00a0 The Danish propaganda arm will have some catching up to do.<\/p>\n Who then, are the third country candidates?\u00a0 Denmark already has a memorandum of understanding with the Rwandan government that covers migration, asylum, return and repatriation.\u00a0 Its purpose is to target an asylum system<\/a> which supposedly gives incentives to \u201cchildren, women and women to embark on dangerous journeys along migratory routes, while human traffickers earn fortunes\u201d.\u00a0 When it was made, Amnesty International\u2019s Europe Director, Nils Mui\u017enieks could see the writing on the wall, calling<\/a> it \u201cunconscionable\u201d and even \u201cpotentially unlawful\u201d.\u00a0 But for Rwanda, just as it is with Pacific island states such as Nauru, money is to be made.\u00a0 Such countries effectively replace demonised people smugglers as approved traffickers and middlemen.<\/p>\n The response to the legislation from those in the business of advocating for refugees and the right to asylum has been uniform in curtness and distress.\u00a0 Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, voiced<\/a> strong opposition to \u201cefforts that seek to externalise or outsource asylum and international protection obligations to other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n UNHCR spokesman Babar Balloch could only make the relevant point<\/a> that the legislation ran \u201ccounter to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention\u201d.\u00a0 Moves to externalise \u201casylum processing and protecting of refugees to a third country\u2026 seriously risk setting in motion a process of gradual erosion of the international protection system, which has withstood the test of time over the last 70 years\u201d.<\/p>\n Balloch is evidently not as attentive as he thinks: those wishing to externalise such obligations have well and truly set this train in motion.\u00a0 The 2018 EU summit went so far as to debate the building of offshore processing centres in Morocco, Algeria and Libya to plug arrival routes via the Mediterranean.\u00a0 The UK government is also toying with the idea<\/a> of an offshore asylum system.<\/p>\n Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch\u2019s Refugee and Migrant Rights Division distils<\/a> the relevant principle being sacrificed.\u00a0 \u201cBy sending people to a third country, what you are essentially doing is taking what is a legal right and making it a discretionary political choice.\u201d\u00a0 It is an increasingly attractive, if grotesque policy, for wealthier countries with little appetite to share the burdens of sharing the processing claims under the UNHCR\u2019s Global Compact on Refugees.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for Frelkick and their like, the Danish government is proving derivatively consistent.\u00a0 It has been opting out of the European asylum system since the 2000s, doing its bit to fragment an already incoherent approach in the bloc.\u00a0 The centre right government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, just by way of example, was proud to reduce the number of asylum seekers and those wishing to settle in Denmark.\u00a0 In 2004, 1,607 people were granted asylum compared to 6,263 three years prior.<\/p>\n The approach of the current government is to negate the very right to seeking asylum in Denmark, aided by third countries.\u00a0 And there is not much left to do, given that the country received<\/a> a mere 1,515 asylum applications in 2020, its lowest in two decades.\u00a0 Of those, 601 were granted permits to stay.<\/p>\n Lurking, as it always does in these situations, is the Australian example.\u00a0 The right to asylum is vanishing before the efforts of bureaucrats and border closing populists.\u00a0 The UN Refugee Convention, like other documents speaking to freedoms and rights, is becoming a doomed relic.<\/p>The post Denmark Offshores the Right to Asylum<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This has been a fantasy of Danish governments for some time.\u00a0 There have been gazes of admiration towards countries like Australia, where processing refugees and asylum-seekers is a task offloaded, with cash incentives, to third countries (Papua New Guinea and Nauru come to mind).\u00a0 Danish politicians, notably a good number among the Social Democrats, have [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Denmark Offshores the Right to Asylum<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[231,175,3208,4834,524,238],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194251"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194863,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194251\/revisions\/194863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}