Mobilized on the issue of migration since 2003, FIDH is concerned about the outsourcing of migration policies and increase in their repressive character, particularly through the externalization of borders from countries of destination to the countries of transit and departure. Formal or informal agreements and international programs such as the “Programa Frontera Sur” (United States / Mexico), the “EU / Turkey Deal”, the “Operation Sovereign Borders” (Australia), the EU / Bangladesh agreement, the readmission agreements between Israel and Uganda and Rwanda, or the Italy-Libya MoU most of the time short-circuit democratic processes, generate zones of detention and encampment, increase the militarization of borders and the criminalization of the migratory act. All while strongly making unaccountable the actors of the repression against the migrant people: police, armies, transnational agencies, and non-state actors such as the militias or the multinational companies. The consequences in terms of non-respect of human rights are heavy: repressions, unfair trials, arbitrary detention, police violence, expulsions. Moreover, this repressive situation is pushing people on increasingly dangerous roads, to bypass the most heavily used roads now excessively controlled and militarized. Pushed into the hands of criminal actors, people on the move find themselves in situations of slavery, trafficking, ill-treatment, sexual violence or gender-based violence.
Given the consequences of the dynamics of externalization of borders and migration policies on human rights at the global level, the FIDH:
- Condemns the externalization of borders and the xenophobic and racist nature of the policies pursued by the fortress states against certain populations on the move;
- Condemns migratory cooperation between destination countries and unsafe states such as Turkey or Libya, as well as agreements that combine economic assistance and security approaches such as the Programa Frontera Sur or that promote collective expulsions.
- Demands the abolition or closure of the mechanisms and bodies responsible for implementing the dynamics of outsourcing and privatization of migration policies: detention centers for migrant people in buffer or transit countries, Eurosur, Frontex, European laissez-passer (LPE), TIGRES, GOET, UTIC, Sovereign Border task force …
- Demands the elimination of the factors that drive people to use dangerous migratory roads, and demandes the application of the right to migrate through the opening of safe and legal routes: resettlement, visas, corridors, humanitarian passes etc.
