The EU’s hypocrisy in claiming to reject authoritarianism while enacting arbitrary and violent policies against refugees
After this week’s G7 meeting, the EU leaders said in a joint statement that they ‘reject authoritarianism’ — I invite them to actually do that!
Together, the European Union and the United States are an anchor for democracy, peace, and security around the world, to peacefully prevent and resolve conflicts, uphold the rule of law and international law, and promote human rights for all, gender equity and equality, and the empowerment of women and girls, including by working together through multilateral institutions including the UN Human Rights Council. Together, we resolve to address humanitarian needs and stand up for international humanitarian law as well as expand the resource base for humanitarian action. We reject authoritarianism in all its forms around the globe, resisting autocrats’ efforts to create an environment that protects their rule and serves their interests, while undermining liberal democracies. We intend to enhance cooperation on the use of sanctions to pursue shared foreign policy and security objectives, while avoiding possible unintended consequences for European and U.S. interests. In this respect, we resolve to continue to engage on issues on which we might have different approaches.
Noble sentiments, however: look at the bloody hypocritical mess that is EU policies against refugees and people who migrate irregularly out of vital necessity and having been disallowed any legal route to do so. (There are some legal routes to resettlement for refugees, but only for tiny tokenistic numbers, just big enough to be useful as material for self-legitimizing propaganda for EU authorities, not a realistic response to the scale of human needs. The EU has the biggest or second biggest capacity globally to resettle people but accepts the tiniest proportion of responsibility now.)
Arbitrariness of decision-making is of the essence of authoritarianism, so when they’ve been blatantly and systematically violating human rights laws for protecting refugees for the last 5 years, more than ever before, and they keep on doubling down on their policy aims of keeping almost all refugees out of Europe by any violent means necessary, including collective punitive deterrence against those who made it in past their violent borders, and competing between states to avoid as much responsibility as possible by making their asylum procedures and reception systems more delayed and more degrading than their competitor states, their claim is sheer hypocrisy.
EU leaders talk about human rights for refugees is just self-legitimizing rhetoric these days, it’s not sincere or practical. Whenever they have a choice to actually do it, they choose partiality for their own racial, ethnic or national group and injustice to those they’ve politically imagined as Other. Human rights are based on the natural fact of intrinsic human dignity, not on an authoritative or conventional grant by White-majority states. The idea of granting or dispensing rights to human beings is inherently authoritarian — it sets up an imaginary authority of a partial group who has the imagined ‘right’ or authority to dispense ‘rights’ to members of out-groups according to the own-group or their authority’s arbitrary feelings. On the contrary, human rights are to be recognised, declared and respected in practice, universally and hence regardless of social constructs of race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Such a moral realist view of the nature of human rights is stated in the Preface to the European Convention on Human Rights — the philosophical basis of the law, and it’s stated as necessary and essential for authentic and consistent democratic values.
Their violent borders, commissioning third-party agents to commit refoulment on their behalf outside their territories in order to preclude as many asylum applications as possible, competitive avoidance of responsibility between themselves, and collective deterrence policies by penalizing refugees who get in despite their violent borders in order to deter the rest, are all predicated on blatant Big Lies. They keep on arbitrarily claiming and repeating things which are clearly counter-factual, and insisting on making policies as if their official alternative reality were true, i.e. they’re making policies in an arbitrary/ authoritarian way.
Arbitrary Big Lies involved:
They claim that violent borders & commissioning third-party agents to commit extraterritorial refoulment for them are in order to reduce human trafficking, altho evidently for years those policies have caused nothing but the opposite results.
They claim that Turkey is a Safe Third Country in terms of EU asylum law on Admissibility (admissibility is about which state is responsible for an application, not about whether the application is valid or eligible for asylum) (defined in APD2013r Art.38), altho they presented no evidence at all for that general presumption and they ignored a small mountain of evidence reports from Turkish and international human rights orgs showing that it’s not remotely true, and even after the Greek asylum system (until 2018) only found that negative general presumption (it’s also illegal to make a negative general presumption in application of the law) to be true, at the last appeal stage, in 0.4% of cases, they still carry on loudly and authoritatively claiming it to be true and basing policy development on it.
If you introduce epistemic and moral arbitrariness in policies about foreigners or politically marginalized people, it always influences the whole social decision making system, because justice is an inherently common good, it can’t be divided into more justice for “us” (imaginary partial “us”) and less for “them” — Biden as a Catholic should understand about inherently common kinds of goods, or in other words ‘goods with a universal destination’ (see ¶164–165 of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church).
The EU’s hypocrisy about human rights and democratic values, which should include an empiricist kind of decision making and rejecting arbitrariness, affects the whole international democratic order negatively insofar as it really exists now, and it affects everyone globally, directly or indirectly, so Biden should consider it his business to say ‘you said you want to reject authoritarianism and that means rejecting arbitrariness, so stop doing that’.
More specifically and positively, Biden should ask the EU leaders to do these twenty positive policy recommendations from European Council for Refugees and Exiles, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International —
Doing those things is really a necessary part of “rejecting authoritarianism in all its forms”, including arbitrariness — произвол (proizvol) in Russian.
