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A few years ago, during an interview on the Pact on migration and asylum that the European Commission had just presented, the Italian lawyer Anna Brambilla said to me: “I propose to found the TGMAFL: Transnational Group of Mutual Aid for Frustrated Lawyers”. Halfway between a joke and a call to action, the idea of Brambilla (who is a member of the Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione, Asgi) was born of an observation: in a Europe that is increasingly hostile to exiled migrants, and faced with the ongoing dismantling of the right to asylum, defending the rights of migrants has become almost mission impossible. As a profession, it has been rendered almost meaningless by political attacks on so-called “militant lawyers”.
The situation has not improved since 2020. A sense of powerlessness has grown among lawyers working on behalf of asylum seekers and others seeking to regularise their presence in the EU. European governments, of right and left, are working to restrict the rights of foreigners by changing laws or ignoring them, and trampling on fundamental rights in the process.
No practice is more emblematic in this respect than that of refoulements. While international law prohibits the return of asylum-seekers to places where their lives would be in danger, this has in fact become common practice in several member states, both at the EU’s external borders (Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Hungary, the list goes on) and at internal ones (such as between France and Italy). Lithuania has just taken a major step by passing a law legalising the practice, but most of the countries that carry out refoulements at the border do so by knowingly breaking the law.
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On Lesbos, a Greek island some ten kilometres off the Turkish coast, refoulements are happening “almost every day, sometimes several times a day, something the authorities systematically deny”, says Ozan Mirkan Balpetek, advocacy and communications officer at the Legal Centre Lesvos (LCL), a Greek-registered non-profit organisation that provides free legal assistance to migrants.
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