{"id":396507,"date":"2021-11-19T11:33:06","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T11:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thecanary.co\/?p=1505574"},"modified":"2021-11-19T11:33:06","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T11:33:06","slug":"detained-and-banned-from-europe-a-british-journalist-in-the-eu-migrant-detention-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/11\/19\/detained-and-banned-from-europe-a-british-journalist-in-the-eu-migrant-detention-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Detained and banned from Europe: a British journalist in the EU migrant detention system"},"content":{"rendered":"
Guards come and laugh at me through the bars of my cell.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re the English, right?\u201d, they ask me. \u201cWhat are you doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou tell me,\u201d I say, for the hundredth time. But they just laugh and wander off.<\/p>\n
I am the only Westerner in a detention centre full of thousands of refugees. I am also the only inmate waiting to be deported to the UK – though of course, I am pretty much the only person here who would not do anything for a one-way plane ticket to London. In a similar irony, the Greek police who run the facility make it very plain they do not want any of my fellow inmates (Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, North Africans) in their country. And yet it’s the same police force which violently arrested them and prevented them leaving.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, while on holiday in Greece, I was detained at the Italian border, arrested, thrown into the Greek detention and migration system for two months, and informed I was banned from the Schengen Area<\/a> for the next ten years. Though I still haven\u2019t been provided with any documentation about the ban, it appears likely that I am being targeted as a result of my reporting and media advocacy from North and East Syria (NES), the democratic, women-led, autonomous region built around Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), which the Turkish government is hell-bent on destroying. Chillingly, it seems the autocratic Turkish government now has the power to impose a unilateral ban from Europe on a British citizen, professional journalist, and media activist like myself.<\/p>\n My two months in detention were just a brief taste of what many refugees, political activists, and journalists from the Middle East and beyond must spend a lifetime enduring. My case provided a window into the violence, squalor, and farce of day-to-day life in the EU\u2019s detention-deportation machine. But it also illustrates the complicity of European states and the Turkish regime in suppressing journalistic freedom, political dissent, and democratic movements.<\/p>\n While travelling from Greece to Italy with a friend earlier this year, I was met off the ferry at the Italian border by a group of armed, balaclava-clad police. I was banned from the Schengen Area for ten years, they told me, at the request of the German government. Thus began my whirlwind tour of the Greek migrant detention system. The port where I was arrested, Ancona, lies on a popular route for people without papers trying to travel through Greece on to Western Europe, and so the Greek police simply dealt with me as they would deal with any irregular migrant pushed back from Italy by the Italian police.<\/p>\nInside the Greek migrant detention system<\/h5>\n