If you flee from war or persecution, you have the right to request asylum in the European Union. However tens of thousands asylum seekers have been brutally pushed back at Europe’s borders in the past years. Sometimes even with the help of Europe’s border agency Frontex.
These illegal actions of EU countries such as Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Spain involve threats, physical violence, assault and abuse during detention or transportation. Migrants are being left to die on their boats or thrown into the sea, handcuffed. Thousands have died as a result and many more are excluded from access to an asylum procedure, where their reasons to request protection should be properly assessed.
The European Commission turns a blind eye to these horrific scenes that are taking place at our common borders.
Instead of taking these countries to the EU Court of Justice, the Commission grants financial support to the countries that carry out these inhumane practices through the use of European migration funds. Funds meant to uphold European law and values, by fulfilling human rights obligations are misused for the opposite.
This has to stop. No EU money should fund these extreme human rights violations at our borders.
The Greens/EFA urgently call on the Commission, especially Vice-President Margaritis Schinas, and Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, to freeze funds to countries that are performing pushbacks and make the new migration funds conditional to human rights compliance.
We have commissioned an in-depth legal study, providing the European Commission a ready-to-use toolbox to instate these conditionalities. (read our study here…)
Help us put pressure on the European Commission, sign now.
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