{"id":831935,"date":"2022-10-08T09:44:34","date_gmt":"2022-10-08T09:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2022\/10\/frontex-european-union-courts-migration-sea-refugee\/"},"modified":"2022-10-08T09:44:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-08T09:44:34","slug":"the-european-union-is-deliberately-leaving-migrants-abandoned-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/10\/08\/the-european-union-is-deliberately-leaving-migrants-abandoned-at-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"The European Union Is Deliberately Leaving Migrants Abandoned at Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

In recent years, European coastguards have illegally pushed tens of thousands of people back across the EU\u2019s sea borders. Now, a court challenge is exposing EU border agency Frontex\u2019s conduct \u2014 and an immigration regime that deliberately drowns people.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Two lifeguards from the NGO Open Arms help migrants off a wooden boat during a rescue mission on March 29, 2021 in the Mediterranean Sea. (Carlos Gil \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

On a summer night in 2020, a boy of not quite eighteen slipped below the waterline in the Aegean Sea, somewhere between the western edge of Turkey and the Greek coastline.<\/p>\n

The physical process of drowning at sea is sometimes over in under a minute, when sped up by the struggle to breathe as saltwater fills one\u2019s lungs and cuts off the supply of oxygen. But the youth in the water did not go quietly. He had no intention of dying. He wouldn\u2019t have come this far, across nations and continents, but for a wild hope of living. He tried to stay above water for as long as he could.<\/p>\n

We know what happened chiefly because there was a witness. His friend Jeancy \u2014 also still a teenager at this point \u2014 was meters away, clutching the sides of a dinghy as high waves hurled it about, watching powerlessly as he went under.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

\u201cThey Intended to Kill Us\u201d<\/h2>\n \n

The maritime environment is cruel and unforgiving. But this was no unlucky shipwreck. Jeancy says that the waves were generated deliberately, thrown up by the maneuvering wake of a Greek coast guard boat at the borders of the European Union (EU). \u201cThey intended to kill us,\u201d says Jeancy. Even in the most generous interpretation, the coast guards were indifferent to the deadly danger their actions posed to the men, women, children, and baby on board the dinghy. Jeancy recalls the guards watching in amusement as his friends drowned. Their laughter may have been the last thing he heard. The guards made no attempt to retrieve the body.<\/p>\n

Too late, Jeancy and the others were finally brought aboard the Greek boat. But this was no rescue. He recalls that some of them were beaten, and their personal effects were stolen. They were forced onto overcrowded rafts with no means of navigation \u2014 far more dangerous than the dinghy they had left \u2014 and marooned in open water. After drifting back toward Anatolia for hours, they were eventually rescued and detained by Turkish coast guards.<\/p>\n

Jeancy attempted to cross the Aegean several times. The time he watched his friend\u2019s death was the second crossing. On the first occasion he got within meters of the Greek shoreline and experienced the first incident in a soon-to-be-familiar pattern. \u201cWe were told we were safe and could turn off the engine,\u201d he later recalled to parliamentarians. Then guards, hooded to avoid recognition, \u201cbegan to search us, and took everything we had \u2014 phones, bags, the clothes that kept us warm.\u201d<\/p>\n

On his third crossing attempt, Jeancy reached land. He was part of a group of eighteen people, including three pregnant women and three children, who came ashore in the sandy south of Lesbos, Greece, late one evening in November. They were intercepted by police, strip-searched, beaten, held on a bus for hours without food or water, and finally once again taken to sea and put on dangerous rafts.<\/p>\n

Jeancy was no seafarer \u2014 he had never even been taught to swim. What possesses a young man to stare death in the face and keep going back? In Jeancy\u2019s case, it was the sense that he had no other choice. After his father died when he was fifteen, his family was persecuted and tortured. Eventually he fled his Congolese home, arriving in Turkey in the winter of 2019. In Turkey there was no safety, no chance of building a new life, and every possibility he would be forced home. In Europe, at least theoretically, he would have access to a fair asylum process and the ability to resume his study of Latin philosophy and literature that he began in Kinshasa. \u201cI want to have a place where I am at peace, where I can sleep,\u201d he says. In practice, of course, he was denied even the chance to apply for asylum.<\/p>\n

Jeancy survived his ordeal \u2014 physically at least. And then he decided to seek justice. He met with front<\/a><\/em>-LEX<\/a>, an organization founded by concerned lawyers and activists to address the lack of legal accountability for European Union migration policy, and particularly for the EU border force Frontex, which the organization\u2019s name is a nod to. Jeancy\u2019s case has now launched<\/a> at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). A man left for dead by the shock troops of Europe\u2019s border army has now come to fight that army in court.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Pushing the Boundaries<\/h2>\n \n

Seaborne assaults of the type conducted against Jeancy are a routine feature of border policing. Despite their lethal consequences, they are often innocuously described as pushbacks. In the Aegean region alone, an estimated forty-three thousand such assaults have taken place. Jeancy\u2019s court case aims to demonstrate that the attacks he was subjected to were not random accidents but were deliberate yet illegal policy of both the Greek border force and Frontex, and that EU law \u2014 including Frontex\u2019s own charter \u2014 requires its operations in the Aegean to end. There is a further chain of reasoning: Jeancy\u2019s case argues that he has a right for his asylum claim to be heard fairly, but that the operations of Mediterranean forces prevent him from exercising that right.<\/p>\n