Letter from Brussels

Rows and Rows of Fences...
Julie Robert

Mano Negra clandestina
Peruano clandestine
Africano clandestine
Marijuana illegal
(from the song ‘Clandestino’ by Manu Chao)

The ‘127 bis’... this is not a banal alpha numeric expression for Belgians. Just to hear it on the news, to read it in the newspapers makes us uncomfortable, embarrassed, and not proud of being a citizen of this country. Well, all the Belgian people are not disturbed by the thought of '127 bis' but I don't want to talk about them...

The ‘127 bis’ is situated in Steenokkerzeel, in the suburbs of Brussels. It is located along a railway track to our national airport, Bruxelles-National. It was inaugurated in 1994 and lodges the asylum-seekers whose applications have been rejected. It also lodges the people who have applied for asylum and are waiting for a response, a response from the Foreign Office which is unlikely to be favourable. It can host 192 persons. '127 bis' is a modem construction built on the model of a prison, divided into four wings and surrounded by two rows of fences. The top of the fences are secured with barbed wire. Those two rows of fences demarcate a few meters long no-man's land. Then there is a third fence. Inside the building, one can find some very small isolation cells (one and a half meters long, three meters wide). In a recent report, the International Federation for Human Rights has declared that the conditions of detention there are very bad.

On reading this, one inevitably thinks about a prison... but the '127 bis' is not a prison, it is what is called a 'closed centre'. There are five more centres of this kind in Belgium, each having its own history and its own office. Officially, these six centres can detain 628 persons at the same time. But, as is the case with prisons, the centres are always overcrowded. Around 7000 persons are detained in these centres every year.

More than 2,000 people pass through '127 bis' every year, as it is also called a 'repatriation centre'. The persons detained there can be of two categories: either they are asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected by the Belgian authorities, or they are people still waiting for an answer from the Foreign Office which has already, before taking its final decision, ruled that a 'yes' to the application was most unlikely. The law says that an asylum seeker cannot be detained for more than two months. But this law enacted on 15 December 1980 has a lot of exclusions that gives the authorities the opportunity to extend the duration of the detention. The question of the duration of the detention is a complex one. In effect, it means that a person can be detained for an unlimited period of time. In fact, as soon as someone is moved from one detention centre to another detention centre, or if he or she resists a deportation attempt, the clock is put back to zero. This means that some people spend more than a year, continuously, in these centres, being transferred from one to another. The law is written with terms like 'in principle', 'unless the case is complex', or 'in these exceptionally serious circumstances'. Such extremely vague expressions allow the Foreign Office to exercise discretionary powers and leave the asylum seekers, the lawyers and the organisations powerless. In reality, it is extremely rare to see someone released from detention centre after having completed the legal detention period. The detenus therefore have no way of knowing for how much longer they are to remain in detention.

The primary question still is: who are the people inside '127 bis'? Three main categories can be defined: arrested at the borders, arrested in Belgium and others.

1.         We find in the first category the foreigners who did not seek asylum, who did not make an application. These people do not have access to the Belgian territory and are put on board of the first flight to the country they have come from (which is rarely their country of origin). This category includes foreigners who arrive at the border without the necessary documents but would still like to get asylum. They are detained during the period when their application for asylum is being processed. Lastly, this category includes persons whose applications have been rejected and who are awaiting their deportation.

2.   The second category includes all persons arrested in Belgian territory. It includes persons whose application for asylum has been rejected. It must be noted that these persons spend the entire period, during which their application is processed, in an 'open centre'. The category also includes those who have given a Belgian address for administrative reasons although their application is yet to be processed. Also included in this category are people whose application is seen as 'suspect' by the Foreign Office and those applicants that are judged by the Foreign Office as pertaining to a country other than Belgium. These people are detained till the determination of the country, the country to which their case pertains.

3.   In the third category are all the persons arrested in Belgium, but who had not made any applications to the authorities at all. These are people who entered illegally into Belgian territory or whose stay has become illegal for whatever reasons. It includes all persons who are not in possession of valid documents, those whose length of legal stay in Belgium is over, those persons considered as a risk to public order, the persons who carry out an activity without the necessary authorization etc. And finally, in this category one finds ressortissant communautaire or those who are nationals of the European Union and who have been arrested by the police because they are suspected of having taken part in 'petty crimes' or of having worked in the 'black market'. They are detained before their deportation. Those people may have valid papers but they are sent back to their country of nationality instead of being put up for trial in Belgium.

In fact, people detained in the '127bis' are just being put there before being turned back to their country as early as possible. And if the authorities don't find a good reason to send them back, they are prisoners not waiting for their release. Rather they are waiting for the Foreign Office to find a good reason to turn them back. Some of them have tried every means, have filled up all the papers, have passed through all the procedures, but still, at the end of it all the Foreign Office decides that they were not welcome in our country. There are many rules and stipulations under which the Foreign Office, or the federal police in charge of the immigration control, might decide to expel someone. And most of the time, they find one or the other.

What is even more shocking is that more and more people coming from countries at war are detained in the '127 bis' or some other closed centre and deported. On 19th January, 2012, the government has passed a new law that specifies the list of 'safe countries'. For the legislator, a country can be considered as 'safe' if it has proved, in a sustained manner, that it does not persecute its citizens within the meaning of Geneva Convention and that there is no risk of serious harm to the asylum seeker, once he returns to his country. This list has to be evaluated every year and the first one, published in March 2012 was riddled with problems. It included countries such as Kosovo, Serbia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Everyone in Belgium is aware that people coming from the Balkans and seeking asylum are mainly Romanis or Gypsies. And it is well known, across the world, that this ethnic minority has always been victim of repeated discrimination and human rights abuses which could clearly be construed as persecution. A paradox or should we say opportunism is that since 2006, Belgian hospitals are 'importing' Romanian nurses to cope with the shortage of staff in their establishments. These nurses are recruited through a company that undertakes the recruiting of the gypsies as well as the trip to Belgium and also facilitates the administrative process. The company helps the nurses find an accommodation and everything that will help them to get integrated. Belgium chooses the people she likes to welcome... it opposes 'economic asylum' but invites nurses because it needs them.

Let us have a look on some figures of asylum request in Belgium. In 2011, there were 25,479 applications for asylum to the Foreign Office. The countries of origin of a majority of the asylum seekers in that year were Afghanistan, Guinea, Iraq and Russia. Also in the 'top ten' were Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Congo. In 67% of the cases, the applications were dismissed.

In the last few months, people hailing from Afghanistan, Palestine or Iran have been sent back to their native countries. Most political asylum seekers to Western Europe are actually running for their lives and are not welcome anywhere else. Recently, I met a Turkish man in Zurich. He had been jailed and tortured in Turkey, suspected of being a militant of the PKK. Just before the sentence being passed (probably a life imprisonment), he managed to escape and to go to Switzerland where he has his family. His escape and subsequent journey to Switzerland were an ordeal, and in Switzerland, he had to hide in an apartment until his lawyer had filled all the details required in the application form seeking asylum, since he was an illegal. But the Swiss Foreign Office didn't give any document to allow him to stay in Switzerland, not even for a few days. As the authorities did not know where he was staying, he went away clandestinely thanks to the money given by his relatives living in Zurich. The last news I got from him is that he has been sent back to Turkey (deported from Belgium, but this confirmation I could not obtain) and that he is presently hiding somewhere in the Turkish countryside to escape a second arrest, which would probably mean his death. A threat to his life was not a good enough reason for Swiss or Belgian authorities to allow him to stay in Europe.

For the last few years, the Belgian authorities are working on ways and means to reducing the requests for asylum. They are working hard at it. Maggie De Block, our minister in charge of the asylum and immigration recently said: "We want to convince even more migrants that they have no future in our country and that they can find new opportunities in their native country". The government has come up with several mechanisms to encourage the asylum seekers to go back to their native country willingly, but it is also working upstream, to discourage them to come in the first place. Some of these measures or proposals are quite shocking.

With the help of the European Union, the foreigners who agree to go back to their country voluntarily receive an indirect financial assistance to start a micro-enterprise or to do a traineeship in any field. To get this incentive, the migrant has to fill up some forms to give the details of his or her projects. In 2011, one third of the foreigners who had chosen to 'return voluntarily' received this financial assistance. The 'voluntary return', as our government calls it, includes the payment for the plane ticket and a return allowance.

A few months ago, in Anvers, a city governed by a right-wing party, another device to encourage the 'voluntary return' has been implemented. In Belgium, the emergency medical assistance for the illegal foreigners depends on the CPAS–Centre Public d'Action Sociale. Its main mission, defined in the article 23 of our Constitution, is to 'allow everyone to be able to live a life in accordance with human dignity'. So, when a doctor decides that a migrant needs an urgent medical intervention, it is the CPAS that pays all the bills. Liesbeth Horman, the president of Anvers CPAS, has decided to link the granting of a medical treatment to the signature of a document in which the migrant commits himself or herself to voluntarily leave the country. This measure is clearly against the law as stated earlier. Horman's policy has been criticised by most of the opposition parties, some of them even calling it as 'soft fascism' or 'anti-democratic'. But as all those parties are in the minority, the measure has been implemented. Anyway, complaints have been filed and only time will tell us if 'soft fascism' has a future in Anvers. Talking about fascism, in April last year, another right-wing party, the Vlaams Belang launched a website where the Belgian citizen could name and identify the persons living on our territory without the proper documents. On the website, the citizen informer finds an easy form to fill the details, and after a few clicks, the details are saved, and communicated to the police.

Along with all the legal and illegal measures taken inside the country to keep the migrants out, our politicians also work on ways and means to reduce the flow of asylum seekers to Belgium. Recently, our last minister in charge of asylum and immigration (he has been replaced since the last polls) went twice to the Balkans with one single aim: dissuade the asylum seekers. During each one of his trip, he took the time to talk with the local authorities to convince them to cooperate in the process of ebbing the flow of migrants from their country of origin or country or they may have subsequently taken refuge. In the words of the minister: "Our dissuasion campaign has been followed by a clear decrease in the requests coming from asylum seekers hailing from Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. The local authorities have been great collaborators, but we have to carry on exerting the pressure". Apart from the fact that these 'dissuasion trips' are questionable, one can wonder how a decent man can ask people living in a country at war (Kosovo) not to want to run away. In 2008, Kosovo declared its unilateral independence from Serbia, and since then, it has witnessed numerous civil wars and attacks from neighbouring regions which do not recognise its new status. And our minister dares going to that country to tell the people that they won't have a better environment and better living conditions in Belgium than in their native country! And a few weeks ago, the new minister in charge of asylum and immigration went to Algeria to meet the Algerian Minister of the Interior to talk about immigration into Belgium. In fact, when the Belgian authorities want to turn back an Algerian, it has to be able to identify the person with certainty. And to do that, Maggie De Block, the minister asked her interlocutor to put up a mechanism of consultation between the two countries. The procedure of identification of Algerian natives is very complex, and everyone knows it. Therefore, a lot of asylum seekers or illegals declare themselves to be Algerians, to make the process difficult and this is something that our authorities want to avoid. With these new methods of collaboration with Algeria, Maggie De Block will facilitate the identification of Algerians and also facilitate the turning back of all the others. Meanwhile and on the top of all these national measures, the European Union has created its own agency to admiaister immigration. This specific organ is called Frontex and its main task is to help the border authorities of all European countries to work together to prevent foreigner from entering its territory. In brief, Frontex promotes, coordinates and develops European border management. It has at its disposal various tools, one being the European Border Guard Teams for the deployment in joint operations (with the local authorities) and rapid border interventions. The agency has been criticised a lot since its creation in 2005, mostly because of its paramilitary character and because much of its rescue work is incidental to a broad undiscriminating deterrence campaign and that directly and through third countries, the asylum seekers are being blocked from claiming even protection under the Refugee Convention (approved in 1951 by the United Nations which, inter alia, sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum).

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 44, May 12-18, 2013

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