Racism is dirty and expensive business for any society

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A study by the Ombudsman of Minorities in Finland reveals that over two thirds of Finnish Roma that were surveyed said they had experienced discrimination in the past year, according to a Migrant Tales story published Sunday. While these types of studies are needed and are highly important, they continue to remind us of a disturbing fact: racism is still alive and kicking in this country.

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Read full story here.

 

While the bad news is that racism is a social issue in this country, the good news is that it is being challenged by migrants and minorities like the Roma.

One of the most important matters to keep in mind when looking at a social ill like racism is that it’s messy and expensive business.

Apart from squandering human resources and opportunities, racism and bigotry usually serve people with low self-esteem, lazy journalists, unjust power structures,  greedy and opportunistic politicians from populist parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* that have built their political careers by spreading hatred and prejudices of other groups.

Even if some parties like the PS claim to be “patriotic” because they want us to believe that they are serving the country’s best interests by spreading intolerance, they are actually the biggest  menace to our society. Maintaining high unemployment by victimizing certain groups costs tax-payers an arm and a leg.

One of the many examples of the hatred and suspicion that politicians spread about migrants is Mäntyharju PS councilwoman Tanja Hartonen-Pulkka, who writes that Finland will no longer be Finland because at this rate white Finns will be a minority in their country.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote recently in a New York Times opinion piece how inequality was a drag and how it was a drag on economic growth He writes:

Specifically, if you look systematically at the international evidence on inequality, redistribution, and growth — which is what researchers at the I.M.F. did — you find that lower levels of inequality are associated with faster, not slower, growth.

Thus if racism fosters economic and social inequality, we should take effective steps to challenge it. We shouldn’t be reading about surveys like the one by the Ombudsman for Minorities, but hopefully in the future how such cases have plummeted.

One reason why we are still very much in denial about intolerance is because those who have power still do too little to tackle the problem for a simple reason: It doesn’t affect them directly. Thus racism and social exclusion could be seen as a stalemate where those are hostile to you still haven’t figured out how to banish you altogether.

Certainly one of the biggest fallacies about integration, or two-way adaption, is that it actually happens on a wide scale. Certainly this type of discourse serves the interests of the majority culture.

A good example of the latter was a retired teacher I spoke to about two years ago. The person, who claimed to be an expert on “multiculturalism,” complained to me about the Muslim religion. I asked: “What are you offering in return for their religion? Our hatred and suspicion?

Our society has still a long way to go before it begins to respect cultural and ethnic diversity. In this task, migrants and minorities must do much more these days to represent themselves and challenge the very structures that encourage assimilation and only speak of integration as an ideal.

Finland has the means but do we have the will?

* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.

 

Over two thirds of Finnish Roma surveyed said they had experienced discrimination in the past year

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A study by the Ombudsman for Minorities of Finland reveals that a bit over two thirds of Finnish Roma that were surveyed said they had experienced discrimination in the past year, according to Turku-based Turun Sanomat.* Two-hundred and forty-nine Roma of different ages took part in the study. 

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Read full story (in Finnish) here.

 

The majority of the discrimination cases took place at stores and gas stations. Some respondents said that one of most humiliating matters at stores or other public places was when they were followed by employees or security guards.

Half of  the respondents said they had suffered discrimination when seeking employment.

Meanwhile, the Pori District Court is looking into an extensive discrimination case involving 13 restaurant workers from nine restaurants in the western city of Pori that are suspected of discrimination on ethnic grounds, according to Turun Sanomat.

The accusations  are being brought by four Roma, who are joined by a white Finnish witnesses as well as a journalist of Pori-based daily Satakunnan Kansa.

One of the Roma at the trial asked the restaurant employee why he and three other Roma weren’t permitted to enter the premises. The employee responded: “Because you’re Gypsies.”

 

*Thank you Helena Kosonen for the heads-up.

Institute of Race Relations: Language testing of asylum claimants – a flawed approach

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Aisha Maniar

Following a critical Supreme Court judgment on the Home Office’s use of controversial language analysis tests to determine the nationality of asylum seekers, Aisha Maniar asks: why does the government insist on using these tests?

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Read orginal posting here.

 

Language is a crucial element of the identity of each and every one of us, and a marker of social and cultural inclusion. Over the past twenty years, it has increasingly been used by western states as a means of determining political and bureaucratic identity – nationality – and consequently to reject the claims of undocumented asylum seekers on the basis that the language they speak is not that of their claimed country of origin. And where a language analysis places the claimant’s linguistic origin elsewhere than the country from which they are seeking asylum, not only is the asylum claim rejected, but removal is, in many cases, to the wrong country, which the language analysis deems them to come from.

Decisions made by the immigration authorities in asylum cases can be a matter of life and death. Can language, which has only a tenuous link to nationality – a stateless person has the former but not the latter – provide a reliable tool in determining the origin of asylum seekers?

Language analysis

Language analysis testing in determination of asylum claims is a relatively new area of linguistics, first used in the mid-1990s in Scandinavian countries, and now used elsewhere in Europe as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Some countries have their own government department providing the service, but most, including the UK, outsource it to small commercial companies. There is no set method for such testing, but in the UK, a typical language analysis[1] involves a taped telephone interview of the asylum seeker by a language analyst, lasting around twenty to thirty minutes, during which the analyst works through a standard list of questions and carries out a linguistic analysis and ‘knowledge assessment’[2] of the interviewee’s knowledge and experience of their stated country/region of origin. With a linguist, the analyst then assesses, to one of five degrees of certainty, whether the interviewee originates in the claimed country. The report can be produced within fifteen minutes of the interview, and is often treated as conclusive.

Following a pilot on several nationalities – including Iraqis, Afghans and Tamils who at the time made up a large number of applicants – the method has been used in the UK for the past decade, but has been subject to much criticism.

Sprakab

The UK Home Office uses the linguistic analysis services of Swedish company Skandinavisk Språkanalys AB, or Sprakab, a private commercial company which works almost exclusively for governments and in the public sector, providing similar services to the governments of Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, among others. Sprakab says that it has carried out over 40,000 tests in its fourteen-year history and currently provides 4,000 tests annually worldwide. Given that the ultimate purpose of such testing is to help determine entitlement to protection under international law, the use of a private profit-based corporation is a key criticism. The company’s insistence on the anonymity of its linguists and analysts ‘for their own safety’ has also been criticised for hampering transparency and understanding of the decision-making process.[3]

According to Sprakab’s website: ‘The results are very reliable and […] provide a clear picture of an individual’s language background’, yet before a court, the company manager ‘agreed that linguistic analysis could not determine a nationality’; ‘an individual’s language background’ is not an indicator of their nationality.[4]

Unqualified analysts, unreliable results

There is confusion over the role and qualifications of analysts and linguists employed by Sprakab. Home Office guidance[5] states that ‘Sprakab analysts have linguistics backgrounds and experience in dialectology’ and linguists ‘have the equivalent of a master’s degree in either linguistics or phonetics’. In many cases, this has proved not to be true. Very often the linguist is qualified in a related field (such as having a language degree) and the analyst’s main qualification is the ability to speak a language. Many analysts are employed to analyse the mother-tongue competency of asylum seekers in languages which they themselves do not have as a first language.

Additionally, Sprakab’s own standards lack the scientific accuracy one should expect of a forensic linguistic procedure. In over two decades of language analysis testing by Sprakab and other similar companies, there is no empirical evidence that language analysis bears any relevance to the determination of the citizenship or nationality of any individual. The general consensus among professional linguists and experts who provide testimony in court is that language analysis testing is not fit for purpose. Dr Derek Nurse, an expert on the minority Somali Bajuni community, describes the Sprakab analyses and conclusions he has examined as ‘brief, careless, lacking in supporting evidence, and unconvincing’. Other experts have called it ‘unwise‘ to rely on Sprakab reports to make legal decisions, with one submission to parliament stating that the process is‘deeply flawed, unprofessional, flies in the face of expert opinion, and infringes the Human Rights of large numbers of vulnerable individuals’.

Language matters

A large number of basic linguistic errors that undermine Sprakab’s purported experience and expertise have been pointed out. For example, contrary to the assumptions behind the tests, monolingualism is not the norm in many societies. In addition, the method does not take code-switching into account, a phenomenon in which a bilingual or multilingual speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in a single conversation; it is often done unconsciously. It is also common for a speaker of a minority language to speak automatically in the dominant/majority language of a country/region when speaking to people outside of their own community. Nonetheless, a taped recording of less than thirty minutes is expected to provide certainty in assessing an individual’s nationality.

Other language issues that are ignored are more specific to refugee communities. For example, years and decades of war and upheaval can have a massive impact on the language patterns of a whole region – whole groups of people are dislocated, within and outside borders – and new social interactions are born. In addition, the reality of refugee diasporas is that generations now grow up and live permanently displaced in refugee camps in bordering countries. This dislocation inevitably affects the language of whole communities. Trauma can also have an impact on linguistic ability.[6]

In the case of the Somali Bajunis, who are almost always assessed as being Kenyan Swahili speakers, experts observed other issues such as, for example, the fact that the average educational level of members of this island community may not equip them to answer ‘knowledge assessment’ questions about Somali politics and history. Many Bajunis are not familiar with using telephones; in at least one case, it was the first time the interviewee had ever used a telephone.[7] Several experts have also reported that applicants seem ‘afraid and confused‘ by the impersonal telephone interview approach.

Language analysis cannot determine nationality

Leaving aside the methodology applied, the main criticism, particularly among professional linguists, is that such tests are of limited value, and in particular ‘cannot be used reliably to determine national origin, nationality or citizenship’, as these are ‘political or bureaucratic characteristics, which have no necessary connection to language’.[8] In recognition of the growing use (and misuse) of language tests for determination of origin, in 2004, a group of international linguists produced Guidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in Relation to Questions of National Origin in Refugee Cases, mainly for the use of governments and decision-makers, to emphasise the limitations of language testing and to deal with the difficulties. They point out that language tests can disclose the region of socialisation, but conclude that ‘language analysis should be used with considerable caution in addressing questions of national origin, nationality or citizenship’. The Guidelines, which offer clear and practical instructions for the use and limits of language testing, have since been endorsed by many professional linguistic organisations, including the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) and the International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL). But neither the Home Office nor Sprakab follow the Guidelines (they both have their own), and a decade on from their introduction, persisting problems show that they have not had quite the intended effect on the government and non-linguist decision-makers.

‘Anti-asylum seeker agenda’

Refugee advocates argue that language analysis testing is a ‘way of getting around the legal barriers‘ to send people back to war-torn countries. The UK has an obligation under European human rights and international refugee law to consider asylum claims and to provide protection to those fleeing persecution and violence. According to Dr Diana Eades, the use of language analysis testing falls within a ‘wider anti-asylum seeker agenda’.

One needs to look no further than the politicised language of the Home Office guidance: ‘The purpose of language analysis … is to assist in identifying an individual’s true place of origin where it is in doubt [and] deter fraudulent claims based on false claims of origin for actual or perceived benefit’. Testing is conducted ‘either because particular doubts are held’ or ‘because an inadequately documented individual claims to be a nationality/national origin that may be targeted under an exemption to the Equality Act 2010’.[9] The scales are weighted against the applicant before the interview has even taken place.

As of February 2013, an exemption has been applied to all asylum applicants claiming Syrian, Kuwaiti or Palestinian nationality, so if inadequately documented, they are automatically tested, and not just where there is ‘doubt’. The rationale for this is circular: language analysis testing, in particular between October 2011 and May 2012 (done, of course, by Sprakab) showed that ‘abuse was particularly apparent for [these] three claimed nationalities or national origins’.

Taken in the context of the UK’s response to Syria, the world’s largest refugee crisis in recent years, the purpose may be simply to deter applicants from that country. The UN estimates that approximately 2.7 million people have fled the war in Syria in the past few years, with the vast majority seeking refuge in neighbouring countries. In Britain, only fifty people have been accepted as refugees this year under the government’s Vulnerable Persons Relocation package, which was adopted by the government only after a big public campaign. In the case of Somalis, widely targeted by such testing, it has been claimed that ‘applicants may have undergone language analysis simply because they claimed to be Somali, rather than because of doubts about them as individuals’.[10]  Whole groups of people are targeted rather than considering individual applications on their own merits, as required under the Refugee Convention.

Legal challenges

Over the past decade, legal challenges, using expert criticisms frequently based on the Guidelines, have resulted in some improvements to language analysis testing in the UK, and a large number of Home Office decisions made on the basis of such analyses are overturned at appeal, at great cost to the Home Office. But legal decisions have left the basic structure of language testing intact. In a test case brought by a Somali Bajuni woman, the panel of judges at the Upper Tribunal gave guidance on how Sprakab reports are to be used, endorsing them subject to certain safeguards. The case, RB (Somalia), was subsequently upheld in all main respects by the Court of Appeal in 2012. It controversially ruled that where the analyst expressed ‘a high degree of certainty’, little further evidence would be needed to establish the interviewee’s nationality – giving the green light to the Home Office to present language analysis as ‘conclusive’ evidence that asylum seekers were not from their claimed country. The approach was compounded by analysts expressing their opinions as to the general credibility of the interviewee, based on answers to ‘knowledge’ questions. Both these abuses were nailed by the Supreme Court in Secretary of State for Home Department (Appellant) v MN and KY (Respondents) (Scotland). MN and KY both claimed to be from the minority Benadiri clan, which in KY’s case at least was sufficient to make her a refugee, and in both cases, Sprakab testing was relied on to reject their asylum applications. The analysts claimed they were Kenyans and not Somalis. The anonymous Sprakab analyst assessing KY had not visited Somalia since 1990 (eighteen years before the test took place), was not an analyst for her language and, while university-educated, had no background in linguistics or languages. Adding his own value judgement to her ‘knowledge assessment’, he stated ‘Her knowledge sounds rehearsed’.

The Supreme Court endorsed the Scottish Court of Session’s ruling that the Sprakab analysis could not be relied on, adding that Sprakab analysts should not go beyond their scope as experts by offering their opinion on an asylum seeker’s credibility – ‘Expert witnesses should never act or appear to act as advocates’ – and that if anonymity is to be granted to analysts, there must be safeguards for the context within which this applies.

In many ways, the Supreme Court ruling simply endorsed the rules set out in the Guidelines as well as the Home Office’s own guidance – such as not relying on language analysis testing alone – and those of Sprakab. But unlike the experts, the court did not question the purpose of language analysis or call for its use to be abandoned.

Two plus two equals five

There are many reasons why asylum seekers arrive without documentation or adequate proof of their identity. It does not make the work of those tasked with processing their claim any easier. Nonetheless, Britain has a history of policies of deterrence of asylum seekers, and its record as one of the biggest arms manufacturers and exporters in the world, and its support for warmongers and war criminals which make it (albeit indirectly) a major producer of refugees, do not allay concerns that language analysis, along with other quasi-scientific approaches,[11] are designed for deterrence rather than for scientific accuracy. Untested approaches such as language analysis testing will inevitably be the norm, in spite of the costs involved. A redacted 2012 study on the impacts and economic costs and benefits of language analysis testing offers no clear conclusions on the benefits of this approach, but concedes that asylum applications have been steadily falling in recent years.

There may be some benefit in language testing, but ultimately the decision made is political. The reasons for which individuals seek asylum and for which it is granted or denied are also political. The very premise for this approach is couched in political terms. As Diana Eades states, ‘the ultimate problem here is not a linguistic one. Linguists are not responsible for, nor qualified to, provide a solution to this problem, namely the validation of nationality claims’. Language testing may be an answer, but not if validating the nationality of asylum seekers is the question.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

[1] See Home Office asylum process guidance: ‘Language analysis’. [2] See discussion in Secretary of State for the Home Department v MN and KY [2014] UKSC 30. [3] For this and many other criticisms see the decision by the Inner House of the Court of Session in MN and KY’s case. [4] See Secretary of State v MN and KY above. [5] See note 1 above. [6] See in particular the report by D Nurse, Overview of Sprakab linguistic analyses of Bajuni refugee claims 2004-2010 (2010, modified 2013). [7] Cited by the Inner House of the Court of Session in MN and KY’s case, note 3 above. [8] From the Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. See an earlier IRR News article, ‘The use and abuse of language analysis in asylum cases’ (21 July 2005). [9] An exemption to the Equality Act 2010, granted by ministerial authorisation, allows immigration officers to discriminate against groups defined by nationality, national or ethnic origin for the purposes of immigration control, by, for example, subjecting members of such groups to more intensive examination or carrying out additional tests. [10] See Sarah Craig, ‘The use of language analysis in asylum decision-making in the UK – a discussion’ in Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law (2012) 255. [11] For other quasi-scientific approaches to assessment of origin see ‘Bad science?’, IRR News (24 September 2009). See also Craig, note 10 above.

 

Helsingin Sanomat: Ulkomaisten tutkijoiden vaikea työllistyä Suomessa

Posted on by Migrant Tales
Gareth Rice

Kun saavuin Suomeen yliopistotutkijana Britanniasta, päätin yrittää olla valittamatta siitä, miten Suomessa korkeakoulujärjestelmää hoidetaan. Valittaminen on kuitenkin luonnollista, ja olen varma, että miltei jokainen Suomessa asuva ulkomaalainen on tehnyt niin ainakin kerran.

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Lue alkuperäinen kirjoitus tästä.

Suomalaista korkeakoulujärjestelmää pyörittää joukko vaikutusvaltaisia suomalaisia professoreita, jotka toimivat portinvartijoina. Ulkomaalaisten akateemisesti koulutettujen on vaikea päästä vakituisiin tehtäviin.

Suomen korkeakoulujärjestelmän avautumisessa muunmaalaisille lahjakkaille tieteentekijöille on tapahtunut edistystä, mutta kehitys on ollut hidasta. Saadakseni tarkemman käsityksen asiasta lähetin kaikille Suomen yliopistoille sähköpostin, jossa tiedustelin ulkomaisen henkilökunnan määrää.

Turun yliopiston tilanne kuvaa koko maata. Viidestäsadasta Turun yliopiston vakituisesta työsopimuksesta vain 21 ei ole Suomen kansalaisten hallussa. Näistä vain kahdeksan puhuu äidinkielenään jotakin muuta kuin suomea, ruotsia tai saamea.

Olen ihmetellyt näitä tilastoja sekä muita samantapaisia asioita, joita olen nähnyt aiemmin. Tutkittuani asioita ja puhuttuani tutkijakollegoille eri yliopistoissa ympäri Suomea minulle jäi neljä mahdollista selitystä tilanteelle.

Ensimmäinen on suomen kieli. Ilman kykyä puhua tai ainakin lukea suomea suuri osa maan korkeakoulujärjestelmää ja laajempaa kulttuuria jää ulkomaalaisen ulottumattomiin.

Toiseksi suomalaiset nimittävät tehtäviin mieluummin “omiaan” kuin ulkomaalaisia, kyvyistä huolimatta.

Kolmanneksi on suomalaisia, jotka kokevat, että tietoa tulisi toisintaa tietyllä tavalla ja että heillä on etuoikeus pysyviin akateemisiin työsopimuksiin Suomessa yksinkertaisesti siksi, että tämä on “heidän maansa”.

Neljäs mahdollinen selitys yllätti minut: suomalaiset tieteentekijät ovat epävarmoja itsestään eivätkä halua ottaa riskiä, että ulkomaalainen tutkija saattaisi haastaa heidät, mikä voisi vähentää heidän arvovaltaansa.

Tuntuu, että maan hierarkkisen korkeakoulujärjestelmän isoisät valitsevat mieleisensä eliitin jatkamaan perittyjä periaatteita ja varmistavat näin korkeakoulujärjestelmän toisinnan nykyisessä muodossaan.

Olen kuitenkin kiitollinen suomalaiselle korkeakoulujärjestelmälle monista niistä asioista, joita se on minulle opettanut.

Näistä opetuksista tärkeimmän professori Michael Ignatieff ilmaisi ytimekkäästi oivaltavassa muistelmateoksessaan Fire and Ashes.

“Kun asuu muiden ihmisten maassa, törmää ajan mittaan lasioviin ja suljettuihin alueisiin, jotka on varattu sisäpiirille. Tajuaa ymmärtävänsä ainoastaan sen, mitä sisäpiiriläiset sanovat, mutta ei sitä, mitä he todella tarkoittavat.”

Gareth Rice
tutkija, yliopistonopettaja
Helsinki

The PS of Finland once again reveals its hostility towards migrants and cultural diversity

Posted on by Migrant Tales

One of the most interesting matters to watch about the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party is how their explanations and arguments change to hide their hostile and xenophobic stances against migrants and Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity. PS party secretary Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo was quoted as saying on YLE that Finland should stop development aid and end welfare to refugees and migrants. 

Once again the PS’ hostile stance to migrants and minorities in this country is exposed in the raw. The statement by Slunga-Poutsalo, one of the signers of the anti-immigration Nuiva Manifesto, reveals as well how much out of touch the party is with migrants and migration.

While the Nuiva Manifesto favours assimilation, or one-way adaption, Finland’s constitution and its laws support integration, or two-way adaption.

The proximity of next year’s parliamentary elections is one of the reasons why the PS’ party secretary is making these types of xenophobic statements. The other reason is that she, like her party, loathe migrants and cultural diversity.

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Read full story (in Finnish) here.

 

We’ve heard similar statements by the PS in the past. If the PS doesn’t want refugees in Finland, why would it want to stop development aid? Doesn’t development aid discourage migrants from coming to this country?

The most distressing matter about Slunga-Poutsalo’s comments is that it wants she wants to stop offering welfare to migrants that cannot support themselves upon moving to Finland. Even if it isn’t clear what this actually implies, the context of the statement reveals that the PS wants migrants to be second-class members of society.

 

* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.

 

Institute of Race Relations: The ‘Guantánamization’ of Belgium

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Frances Webber

A new book on Belgium, Guantanamo chez nous?, is an important contribution to the analysis of racism and the war on terror in Europe.

It would be hard to find anyone in the UK who has not heard of Abu Qatada. But how many people know that he was recently acquitted of terrorist charges in Jordan? The story, the person behind the name is unknown – he has become an icon of ‘Islamist terrorism’, a dehumanised trope which is fed by and in turn feeds rampant anti-Muslim racism, and is used to justify ever-increasing securitisation (more surveillance, more police powers) and attempts to de-universalise basic rights, to make them contingent on behaviour and not ours by virtue of our common humanity. The demonisation is so powerful that it renders impossible any rational argument about Qatada’s actions or his treatment by the justice system; any suggestion that his eleven years’ detention and deportation was unjust would be seen as either very misguided or symptomatic of support for terrorism.

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Read original story here.

Nizar Trabelsi is Belgium’s own Abu Qatada. In September 2001 he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to attack a NATO air base in Belgium. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment which he served, only to be extradited to the US to face further charges based on the same incidents. In this book, Luk Vervaet enters the lion’s den, arguing that Trabelsi’s punishment has been disproportionate and his treatment unjust, an injustice made possible by the processes of racist dehumanisation which, post-9/11, engulfed the already marginalised north African-origin Muslim community in Belgium.

Racism is, in the final analysis, injustice, and in Guantanamo chez nous? (Guantanamo in Belgium) Vervaet describes the deepening injustice towards its Muslim citizens brought about by Belgium’s co-option into the US-led war on terror and the resulting securitisation and ‘Guantánamisation’ of Belgian society. The book interweaves the story of Trabelsi’s imprisonment and his October 2013 extradition with the bigger story of which it forms part, with chapters dealing with Belgian complicity with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme (through authorising the use of its airports and air space); the government’s failure to protect its Muslim citizens ‘rendered’ to Guantánamo or subjected to torture in Morocco, which mirrors their neglect and exclusion at home in Belgium; the huge growth in the prison estate and the adoption of techniques condemned as inhuman or degrading treatment for the control of prisoners; the difficult issues raised by young Muslims going off to Syria or Afghanistan and the ban on suspected Islamist sympathisers exercising a profession.

Initially, Belgium was a critic of the US invasion of Iraq. But when campaigners sought to prosecute General Tommy Franks in Belgium for war crimes arising from the Iraq invasion, under laws of universal jurisdiction accepted by Belgium, the US threatened a trade boycott and the removal of NATO headquarters from Brussels. Under such direct and blatant pressure, parliament amended, then revoked the universal jurisdiction law, allowing Franks to go untried. This was the beginning of a ten-year slide from universalist and rights-based principles. The mighty were above the law; the lowly, or in this case the dehumanised Trabelsi, beneath it. His extradition, a decade later, is to face charges based on the same incident, in breach of the principle that no one should be tried twice for the same offence; it took place in breach of a stay imposed by the European Court of Human Rights; and it followed twelve years of a prison regime featuring almost constant isolation, in breach of prison policy and to the condemnation of the Council of Europe Committee on the Prevention of Torture.

Vervaet’s analysis of terrorist incidents in Europe is telling, demonstrating the minuscule proportion of such incidents which can be described as ‘Islamic’ in motivation and the total lack of even-handedness vis-à-vis terrorism of the extreme Right. He is angered by the criminalisation of young Muslims who go to fight dictatorship in Syria or occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq, as against the impunity for volunteers recruited to the Israeli Defence Force, and for mercenaries who fight anywhere. But perhaps some of the most valuable parts of the book are those where Vervaet examines prisons, prison regimes and the changes in prison policy – subjects he discusses with the fluency and authority of the insider. It is in the prison system and the way Muslim ‘national security’ prisoners in particular are treated that we see the way dehumanisation and racism corrode decency.

Belgium used to have a progressive prisons policy, with few prisons and no high-security units or isolation regimes. But the justice minister who in 1996 announced that prison didn’t work and proposed an ambitious ‘alternatives to prison’ policy, who signed his country’s formal abolition of the death penalty, later presided over the opening of high-security units in two prisons. He signed the warrant for Trabelsi’s extradition to a supermax future in the US, and under his watch, the Council of Europe condemned Belgium for its use of ‘white torture’ methods – deafening music and opaque goggles – on detainees during transfer, and for the conditions of detention for prisoners in the isolation regime. In July 2010, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture reported that the high security regime, designed for ‘unmanageable’ prisoners with ‘extreme, persistent behaviour problems … posing a threat to staff and/ or other inmates’ was being misused, within months of its inception; Trabelsi was one of five of the eight prisoners in the Bruges unit, and six of the nine at Lantin, who should never have been put there. Unabashed, the justice ministry has now signed off a massive prison construction programme, including Belgium’s first dedicated high-security prison.

Whether Trabelsi’s initial prison sentence of ten years was proportionate to the conspiracy he was said to have hatched alone, is a vexed question. But there can be no doubt that his treatment in the criminal justice system stands as a template and exemplar for the racist dehumanisation of Muslims in Belgian prisons and in its wider society. From his receipt of the maximum sentence possible for a terror attack, despite his plea of guilty and the fact that the plan was never implemented, to his years in the isolation regime, which led to physical and psychological damage, through his endless, wearying struggle against official obstructions for permission to marry, with the political and media portrayal of his fiancee as a dangerous terrorist, to the final trick – telling him, before the transfer to the military airfield and the CIA extradition flight, that he was being transferred to another prison where he could marry – all smack of vindictiveness, of injustice. This treatment culminated in the illegal extradition which is, for Vervaet and for Trabelsi’s lawyer Maitre MarcNeve (former vice-president of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture), who writes the preface, symptomatic of the disastrous slide from the values of universal human rights and the rule of law.

Vervaet’s own story, which he recounts as one among many cases of a new ‘Berufsverbot’[1] or politically-inspired dismissal from work, stands as an example of the new McCarthyism which brands all attempts to understand or to reconcile as ‘enemy propaganda’ and ‘support for terrorism’. A teacher of Dutch to prisoners, he found himself banned from all Belgian prisons – and so deprived of his livelihood – in August 2009, for ‘reasons of national security’ which were never spelled out. Although he won his case against the lack of reasons for the ban in the Constitutional Court, he has never been compensated for losing his livelihood. Another man, who organised football matches for prisoners for eighteen years, was banned on the basis of a false rumour that he intended to help Trabelsi escape – despite having never met him.

Vervaet takes issue with the Left’s passivity, its impotence, its failure to challenge all of this and in some instances its complicity. He points out that Belgium, as a tri-lingual country which has been a battlefield in two world wars, has a unique legitimacy and moral authority to resist involvement in the new imperialist wars. His message is: wake up from your silence, your indifference – Belgium can stand for peace, for dialogue.

His analysis of the ‘Guantánamisation’ of Belgium, and his message, resonate in Britain, with our history of racialised monsters and injustice, from the Birmingham Six to Winston Silcott. In common with much of Europe, we too see the demonisation of Islam and its followers, the mobilisation of enormous resources to detect and punish so-called supporters of terrorism in racialised groups – and with these trends, the erosion of principles of universality in human rights and equality before the law.

Vervaet’s book needs to be widely read, and – as its currently available only in French – to be translated into English.

Related links

Read an IRR News story: Belgian prison teacher vindicated

Read an IRR News story: Belgium: arbitrary state power checked in prison teacher case

Read an IRR News story:  Prison teacher victim of new McCarthyism in Belgium

 

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Death of Colombian in police custody in Finland sheds light on the desperate plight of many undocumented migrants

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The tragic death* of a twenty-six-year-old Colombian should awaken us to the many dangers that some undocumented migrants face in Europe. According to the Finnish police, Sergio Camilo Becerra González, committed suicide while his parents suspect he was a victim of xenophobia, according to Caracol. 

Both outcomes, death by suicide or xenophobia, are harrowing reminders of the vulnerability that undocumented migrants face in Europe.

The question we should be asking is why did this young man die in the first place and could his death been prevented?

The father of the victim, Rafael Becerra, was quoted as saying on Noticias Capital  that he had heard five similar cases of migrants dying in Finland while in custody. He doesn’t source his claim.

See Noticias Capital news report (in Spanish) here.

 

Becerra González’ tragic fate sheds light as well on a disturbing fact: our lack of caring for the plight of others.

According to unofficial reports by advocacy groups, up to 10,000 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean in about twenty years. These so-called boat migrants are estimated to account for less than 10% of  the over 1 million new immigrants entering the European Union from non-EU countries by air, land or sea each year, according to FactTank. 

Näyttökuva 2014-8-2 kello 12.26.02

Read full story here.

 

One of the questions we should be asking in light of what happened to Becerra González and others like him, is if spending billions of euros to erect higher walls and more effective surveillance in Europe effective solutions.

What is wrong if a person flees war or searches for a better life elsewhere? Didn’t Europeans emigrate to the Americas by the millions at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century? What about European involvement in slavery, exploitation and genocide of indigenous group in Africa, the Americas and elsewhere during colonialism?

In Finland alone, over 1.2 million Finns emigrated between 1860 and 1999 in search of better opportunities.

Part of the narrative on migration in Europe comprises of generous doses of amnesia and fear.

Tightening immigration policy and attacking people who search for better lives in Europe, especially when your country’s standard of living has benefited from the exploitation and war in other countries, is disingenuous to say the least.

Halting migration, especially undocumented migration, is as absurd as was prohibiting entrepreneurship in the former USSR. The present campaign against undocumented migrants in Europe resembles the present war on drugs, which is based on lies and myths that benefit the budgets and wallets of border enforcement agencies and drug traffickers, respectively.

We have to find more effective solutions to immigration than just the usual get-tough stances spread by anti-immigration and even mainstream party politicians.

As long as there is poverty and grossly unequal living standards between countries, immigration will soar, not subside, in the future.

 

*Read Friday’s story about the tragic death of Sergio Becerra González here.  

 

 

Noticias Capital: Colombian undocumented migrant dies while in custody in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A Migrant Tales visitor got in touch with us from Colombia and shared a sad piece of news about a twenty-six-year-old  Colombian who died while detained by the police in a Finnish jail. The police claim that the young man, Sergio Camilo Becerra González, committed suicide but the parents suspect that he was a victim of xenophobia, according to Caracol. 

The father of the victim said that he had heard of five similar cases where undocumented migrants had died under police detention in Finland.

Becerra González had come to Finland in May to study acrobatics. He was accepted to study at a school after he passed a three-day entrance exam.

News report (in Spanish) on Noticias Capital of Colombia about the death of Sergio Camilo Becerra González.

 

Becerra González won twice the Colombian cheerleader championship and was once crowned Latin American champion. His dream was to come and study acrobatics in Europe. He first went to France to study on a scholarship but was turned down a residence permit. He then came to Finland on an invitation by an acrobatics school.

The parents of the deceased claim that they are certain that their son didn’t commit suicide, according to Caracol.

”They told us that he had had some problems [in Finland],” said the mother Amanda González, ”we started to make some phone calls to some friends he had made in Helsinki, and they told us Tuesday by chat about his death.”

The parents want their son to be flown to Colombia for a new autopsy.

 

Finlandization was very bad for refugees, especially Soviet asylum seekers

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A story in Thursday’s Helsingin Sanomat shows that the shadow of Finlandization continues to hang deep on Finland even if the demise of the former Soviet Union ocurred in 1991. Even if the Helsingin Sanomat story writes about Finland’s first-ever airplane hijacking case in 1977 involving two Soviet citizens on an Aeroflot flight, it sheds an eerie light on a disgraceful era we should never repeat. 

For those who aren’t that familiar with how Finland returned Soviet citizens to the USSR even if they asked for asylum, the journalist doesn’t tell us why the Soviet hijacker wanted the pilot to fly to Stockholm but ended up instead landing the plane in Finland.

The hijackers wanted to fly to Sweden because they knew they’d get political asylum in that country. Even the pilots knew, which explains why they tricked the hijackers into thinking that they were going to land in Stockholm but ended up at the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.

After almost twenty years of searching, I finally made contact with a former Soviet citizen who crossed the border but was sent back to the USSR in 1976. While there are stories written in the Estonian media about such refugees, the story I published in Apu magazine was one of the few ever published in Finland about the whole ordeal.

Näyttökuva 2014-7-31 kello 8.22.22

 

Read full story here.

It’s unfortunate that Finland isn’t still ready to debate and open up that murky period to investigation.

Writes American Interest about Finland and the cold war:

Usually intended as a pejorative, “Finlandization” describes the phenomenon that occurs when a small country living alongside a large and aggressive neighbor accepts a reduction of its sovereignty, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, in order to maintain independence. The term derives from the posture of neutrality that Finland adopted during the Cold War.

I would go as far as to suggest that one of the roots of Finland’s present-day xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment, like with the rise of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party in 2011, stem from the cold war era. It would be naive to believe that decades of geopolitical isolation and living next door to a country like the Soviet Union didn’t impact it.

Finland was during the cold war effectively a closed country to foreigners never mind foreign investment. Apart from wiping out the little cultural and ethnic diversity that this country enjoyed, the cold war era discouraged as well any serious debate about fascism in this country during the 1930s and especially in the Continuation War (1941-44), when we were an ally of Nazi Germany.

You may ask why Finland and it’s largest daily, Helsingin Sanomat, aren’t enthusiastic about opening up the stuffy dungeons of the past and our complex relations with Moscow.

A partial answer to that question lies in the picture on the Helsingin Sanomat story with Paavo Väyrynen, then foreign minister and today MEP.

 

Racism tells you over and over again: don’t bite the hand that feeds you

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

E.B. White (1899-1985), USAmerican writer

Being an immigrant and Other all my life, researching and especially writing about racism regularly, or daily for the past three-and-a-half years, have taught me a thing or two about this social ill. Some may ask why I write about racism on Migrant Tales. The answer is simple: Finland would be a near-perfect country if our society were more inclusive. 

If I made a video clip on the devastating impact of racism, it would first show a happy community that would end up being consumed by hate as it became more culturally and ethnically diverse. Like adding more fuel to a fire that you want to extinguish, instead of finding effective solutions, anti-immigration political parties would emerge and start to play on people’s fears. Those who could, the more skilled people, would move to other cities and companies would follow suit. It would be a vicious cycle: loss of jobs and impoverishment.

But there are many good people in this country that won’t allow Finland to be fed to the dogs by anti-immigration parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS).* It’s their bravery and example that inspires and gives us hope.

In the same way there are good examples there are also bad ones that cannot be accepted. One of these was reported by YLE Monday about a Nepalese woman who was ordered by security guards at the Rockcock festival of Kuopio forced her to leave the premises because she was collecting empty bottles. Apart from asking the woman in an allegedly demeaning manner why she came to Finland to collect empty bottles, the security guard said that they had a police order to prohibit foreigners from collecting bottles at the festival.

The Kuopio police have denied ever giving such an order.

The Finnish husband of the woman is considering bringing charges against the Rockcock organizers for ethnic profiling. The case has interested human right watchdog Amnesty International.

Racism is a big issue in Finland. We know it’s a big issue. Dead giveaways are our collective denial and our near-silence concerning this social ill.

While our reaction to racism should be first and foremost a reaction, we need a fundamental change in thinking and education beginning at schools and at home.

Racism is a pernicious force that destroys instead of strengthens a society. Just like in some parts of the United States after the Civil Rights Movement (1955-68), it should be clear that there is not only a new era of respect but that racist behavior should be pointed out fearlessly as something shameful.

I had the opportunity in June to hear Swedish Feminist Initiative MEP Soraya Post speak at an European Network Against Racism assembly in Brussels. She said that the problem that minorities face in Europe is due to weak institutions that don’t defend their rights.

IMG_4098

Sweden’s Feminist Initiative MEP Soraya Post speaking at Enar’s general assembly in June. Photo by Enrique Tessieri.

 

Why are those institutions that Post speaks of so weak?

One of the most incredible matters about racism is its selective memory and that it denies, among many other matters, what we are by cooking new narratives and myths.

Every human being was once or has some relative that was a migrant. Since it is a fact that humankind has always been on the move and migrated to new lands, why is this important fact about ourselves conveniently forgotten?

One possible answer to the above question is that when we forget that we were migrants, or have relatives who were migrants, we are entitled, like white privilege, economic, social and political power to rule over others who are more recent migrants.

Time Wise defines white privilege in the following terms:

White privilege refers to any advantage, opportunity, benefit, head start, or general protection from negative societal mistreatment, which persons deemed white will typically enjoy, but which others will generally not enjoy.

In the 1920s and 1930s Finland forged a social construct like Finnish national identity, which was meant to be exclusive, not inclusive.

And it’s exactly that, the exclusive nature of national identity, that makes it so perverse and problematic today to create a socially just society where equal opportunity is the norm, not the exception.

How are we supposed to promote inclusive Nordic values to newcomers if our national identity is so exclusive? This exclusivity has been forged in a backdrop of over 1.2 million Finnish emigrants who left this country between 1860 and 1999.

One way of starting to challenge this exclusive national club, where being white and speaking perfect Finnish is one of the many requirements, is by biting the hand that feeds our racism.

* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The names adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.