The increased criminalization of asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees and Muslims in Denmark is part of a bigger, global problem that will not solve itself. It will only be solved through our struggle for liberation. This process of liberation will continue growing stronger and powerful because it concerns the majority of the world’s population. It is about the right to have rights; it is about freedom, anti-racism and anti-imperialism.
Castaway Souls of Sjælsmark
Freedom of Movements
Copenhagen
24 April 24 2016
Preamble
The mobilization heralded by rejected asylum seekers in Denmark against Denmark’s increasingly repressive laws has entered a new phase. “Castaway Souls of Sjælsmark” and “Freedom of Movements”, two movements that together include rejected asylum seekers, immigrants and refugees, as well as people with citizenship in Denmark, sent their latest manifesto as an open letter to the Danish government on the 14th of April 2016. In this letter, we present a list of 12 substantiated points of struggle and demands (see below), including the demand that Danish authorities are held accountable, that people are not transferred nor deported by force, and that repressive legal measures such as the “migrants assets bill” in the Danish Alien Act are removed. We also denounce the transnational economic interests, which are invested in the increasing criminalization of asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants and Muslims all over Europe (check the crowdfunding online campaign to support the rights of asylum seekers in Denmark).
The open letter was addressed to President of the Danish Parliament Pia Kjærsgaard, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Minister for Immigration, Integration and Housing Inger Støjbjerg, and Minister of Justice Søren Pind. It was sent to these politicians with copies to Danish national and international media, and was officially released on a demonstration on the 14th of April in Copenhagen. The march ended in front of the Danish Parliament.
At the time of writing, “Castaway Souls of Sjælsmark” and “Freedom of Movements” are mobilizing against the forced transfers of people in the deportation camp of Sjælsmark to the even more remote camp of Kjærshovedgård. It appears to be the case that the authorities are moving those rejected asylum seekers that cannot be deported (due to different international and national conventions) to Kjærshovedgård, so that they face even more isolation and uncertainty. It is important here to underline that those persons who cannot be deported to their countries of origin cannot leave Denmark either due to international conventions. So in fact, they are trapped in Denmark’s deportation centers, where they have no perspective of leaving.
We believe it to be no coincidence that many of those who are facing the forced transfers are also those who are active in the struggle. We also believe it to be no coincidence that the letters informing the people who face the forced transfers arrived less than a week after Castaway Souls of Denmark and Freedom of Movements sent an open letter to the politicians who are responsible of different aspects of the realities and injustices lived by asylum seekers in Denmark. This is an instance of retaliation. But it also shows that our struggle is growing, and that the authorities want to crush it before it grows even more. They will not succeed.
On this basis, we invite people to join us in this historical struggle, and mobilize along us on the 27th of April when we will make a protest in front of the Danish Immigration Service at 3pm.
Also, as people who face forced transfers to Kjærshovedgård will be called to interviews with the authorities between 9am and 12m on the 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th, we want to be as many as possible outside Sandholm camp to show solidarity. We urge you to read our manifesto and become informed not only about the conditions faced by refugees, but also about the deeply concerning circumstances, which frame the current political climate in Denmark and Europe.
For the right to have rights! A Manifesto
The increased criminalization of asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees and Muslims in Denmark is part of a bigger, global problem that will not solve itself. It will only be solved through our struggle for liberation. This process of liberation will continue growing stronger and powerful because it concerns the majority of the world’s population. It is about the right to have rights; it is about freedom, anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Our struggle focuses on camps—refugee camps, migration camps, migration detention camps, and asylum camps—and it regards our right to have rights. These are our points of struggle and demands:
1. We struggle for the abolition of camps like Sjælsmark; these camps are not for humans.
The camps are to be found all over the world. In Europe and in Denmark camps are a way to manage the consequences of Europe’s wars and exploitation in our countries. The poverty of our countries, the wars we have fled, the exploitation of our natural resources and the bases for our food sovereignty are directly connected to the peace, welfare and prosperity that many people enjoy in Europe. Europe’s exploitation of our countries depends on the collaboration between European countries and puppet regimes in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The system that makes this possible is racism, a globalized system of oppression closely tied to capitalism. Many people in Europe and Denmark believe that globalization involves enlarged interconnections: economic through trade, cultural through communication technologies and travel, and political and legal through transnational institutions. But they forget that the production of the things that they consume, as well as their quality of life, depends directly on the forced displacement, limitation and restriction of racialized populations in order to control, exploit, and /or eliminate them. To maintain Europe’s welfare, large populations must remain dehumanized: only so can the cheap, uneducated labor force and the raw materials needed to keep Europe’s quality of life intact be guaranteed. Camps are central to the maintenance of social inequalities and in the production of second-class citizens in Denmark as well as on a global level. Camps kill people socially, politically, psychologically. Camps are designed to produce social death, including civil and political death: they prevent people from participating in political and civil life. By this, they are a de facto political and civil killing. To take camps seriously forces us to think through the state of democracy in our societies: does democracy exist in countries that have institutions that engage in repressive and totalitarian practices? Our answer is no. Democracy does not exist in Denmark. Democracy in Denmark is instead an illusion that sustains a false sense of security promoted by the global elites.
2. We struggle for freedom of movement and freedom to stay. We demand the end of forced deportations and transfers, whether secret or public.
We are refugees, not criminals. We were forced out of our countries by the same countries that are forcing these harsh living conditions upon us. When a person has been forced to leave a place as a result of many countries’ political and economic interests, then that person cannot be forced to leave the countries that have gained from the conditions that made her or him leave in the first place. We also demand that people are not transferred by force to even more remote camps, to even less human conditions. Right now, the people in Sjælsmark face uncertainty in relation to whether we will be forcibly moved to a prison in an even more isolated area—Ikast. This prison has recently been emptied in order to make it operational as a deportation camp. At the time of writing, the plans to increase the capacity of Sjælsmark from its current approx. 150 persons to 400 seem to work as part of the global expansion of the camps, which in Denmark benefits very powerful transnational companies and organizations, for example companies that produce fences, building material, security know-how, catering companies, and the NGO and humanitarian industry.
3. We are not criminals, we are not problems, we are not numbers. We have the right to decide over our lives and our futures.
We demand that the Danish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalforsorgen) is not in charge of those facing the threat of deportation. We understand and have accepted that the Danish government has taken and wasted years of our lives, but we will not accept being criminalized again by the Danish state. § 42a, 5 of the Danish Alien Act states that the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for handling the overall management of the camps, including accommodation, handover of pocket money (which does not apply in the case of the rejected asylum seekers – cf § 42a 11 and 12) and money for living expenses, food, education, activities and health care. The Ministry can allocate these responsibilities to the Danish Immigration Service (which is under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), to the Danish Red Cross, the Danish Emergency Management Agency, the Danish Refugee Council (NGO) and local governmental authorities. In the case of Sjælsmark, responsibility has been allocated to the Danish Prison and Probation Service. This underscores how the government is engaged in systematic efforts to criminalize asylum seekers and immigrants. We understand that the criminalization of refugees and immigrants helps the powerful to put focus away from the real problems in society. Instead, they treat people as if we were problems. When societies single out specific groups of people as problems, the final solution is to eliminate them. The camp is the materialization of the racist logic that allows to categorize people as migrant, asylum seeker, refugee, radicalized, first- second- third- fourth- generations immigrant. Those categories allow treating us as problems, as questions: how much will you cost? Why have you come here? Where are you really from? Are you really an asylum seeker? Are you really persecuted? Do you have a right to a mobile phone? What are your real intentions? Do you have a right to complain? Do you have a right to have rights? To be put in that position is to be treated as an object. In Sjælsmark deportation camp one is not only a question and a problem, one is a number that makes one’s name, one’s uniqueness, one’s history and experience, disappear.
4. We struggle for accountability and justice.
While the camp criminalizes us, it is at the same time used to cover over the fact that the politicians who are directly responsible for the current humanitarian crisis and for the deaths of thousands of persons in the Mediterranean Sea and other European borders live lives of freedom and impunity. The camp is also used to cover over the fact that all over Europe, including Denmark, the deeply racist laws that dehumanize us at the same time cover the interests of transnational companies and open up the possibility of capitalist investment in our systematic dehumanization. §§ 37 i, 42 a, 5, 44 a. 2 and 3, and 46 e in the Danish Alien Act regard the allocation of responsibilities and authority pertaining lodging, surveillance, and the daily duties of refugees in camps to private companies, and indeed Denmark is increasingly allocating the management of camps to private companies. The largest transnational security company in the world G4S originated in Denmark, and is one of the major stakeholders in the global prison industrial complex today. G4S already runs the Thisted tent camp. G4S’s work includes private policing and surveillance in Danish schools and universities, transportation of immigrants to private prisons, deportation of people from Mexico in the U.S. to the Mexican border and deportation of Africans from Europe to countries in Africa. G4S is also known for other complicities in human rights violations across the world, most notably in the case of Palestine and Guantánamo.
5. We demand that refugees are given asylum and the right to work.
The Danish government has publicly criticized us for not being educated, not being able to integrate, and for being lazy. But asylum seekers have asked for this right, for asylum, for papers in order to be able to work here, and have been rejected. Some of us have been in camps for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and yet what preoccupies the government is not that it keeps people segregated and dehumanized, that it kills people socially and politically. Instead, the government criticizes us for not doing what it itself prevents us from doing!
6. We demand the right to vote, and we take our right to participate in civil and political life.
The Danish government uses its power, its laws, and its access to the media against us, and as a way to defend and legitimize its racist practices. We insist that it is important to understand how the increased explicit persecution of refugees, immigrants and Muslims in Denmark is connected to the cutbacks in the universities, in schools and in the health system. Is the increased public investment in repression and so-called security an investment in democracy and peace? Are the cut backs to education and healthcare really necessary? In whose interest does this happen? Those who benefit from the increased persecution and “security” measures are not the Danish people; it is the transnational companies that sell fences, arms, surveillance, etc. The idea that refugees and immigrants will find a place in Denmark without a change in its very structures, narratives and institutions is a myth! We know that we are the solution to this problem, and we take our freedom to contribute to making Denmark a real democratic country. We struggle for the construction of institutions that support the protection of health, education, social life and dignity of people—of every one—without one people’s life, wellbeing and dignity being at the cost of the other people’s. We struggle to build institutions that support the collective search for real democracy.
7. We demand adequate housing and humane living conditions for people confined in camps.
We advise everyone to go to the refugee camps themselves and see how their government runs other people’s’ lives. We not only face systematic attempts at our civil, social and political lives, people in camps also face systematic dehumanization in the everyday life: the attitudes of authorities towards us, the fences that transverse camps, the walls, the rules and the food we are “offered” which is of very poor quality, sometimes barely cooked, and does not cater for people who are ill (ex. diabetes, allergies etc.). All of this is a machinery of death.
8. We demand the right to medicine, adequate treatment and healthcare.
Many asylum seekers are in dire need of medical treatment, and the Danish law makes it difficult for doctors to do their work, to answer to their ethical call of treating everyone. Doctors who might wish to help us are afraid to do so: the government can take their license if they do. In the meantime, our illnesses get worse. This is yet another gear wheel in the machinery of death of the camps.
9. We demand accountability from Danish authorities to how the cases of refugees are handled.
Who can asylum seekers ask about our cases? How long do we have to wait? One of the core characteristics of the conditions lived by people seeking asylum in Europe, and in Denmark, relates to this temporal uncertainty: the lack of knowledge about, and answers to, the question of how long time they will have to be subjected to specific dehumanizing conditions. When people are in prison they know how long time they have left there. This is not the case with people in camps who are kept in a situation of uncertainty that contributes to the detriment of their psychological health.
10. We struggle for reparations from the Danish government corresponding to the years that people have been kept in situations of uncertainty, of waiting, of dehumanization.
We know from studies of the legal frameworks relating to asylum seekers in Europe that international and national legal frameworks may clash. These studies alarm that the use of detention in the context of immigration law enforcement has increased in all European member states, and the “institutionalized practice of immigration detention has become an inherent part of a policy package that has as its main aims to deter future migrants and to remove those already in national territory as rapidly and as effectively as possible”, as legal scholar Galina Cornelisse states. The studies also show that there is a generalized lack of transparency in the handling of the people in camps—legally as well as in terms of the conditions to which they are subjected and what instances might bear responsibility. Adding to the lack of transparency is the fact that many of the camps, such as Sjælsmark and the prison in Ikast, are located in remote or isolated areas. In practice this means that these camps and the violations of the rights of people there are virtually invisible to the larger population. We also know from these studies that there are blurred lines in the legal terminology used in relation to asylum seekers and that immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe for the most part fall under national administrative law, not civil law, which often trumps human rights law. In very short terms this means that the different organizations involved in “managing” us can violate our rights in impunity. We struggle to end this impunity, and for reparations for these violations which in Denmark mostly happen from within the framework of the Danish Alien Act.
11. We demand an end to “motivation-enhancement measures” and the other repressive and totalitarian legal measures included in the Danish Alien Act.
The explicit objective of “motivation-enhancement measures” is to “motivate” people who have been categorized as problems, criminals or numbers by the Danish state to leave Denmark. The motivation-enhancement measures were approved as changes in the Danish Alien Act in the summer 1997 (Danish Alien Act §§ 34, 2 and 42a, 5 and 6—law nr. 407 from 10. June 1997), and adjusted by law nr. 473 from 1. July 1998 (by including § 42a, 7), including several changes and bills in later years, the most recent of which is the “migrant assets bill” approved in 2016. Among the most serious measures the “migrants assets bill” states that an asylum seeker cannot apply for family reunion during his or her first three years in Denmark. According to several international human rights organizations, this violates the right to family of refugees. Human Right #16 is called “Marriage and Family” and says this: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” § 9 in the Danish Alien Act and §§ 11a, 11b and 22a in the Danish Law of Marriage and its Dissolution already limits the human right to marriage and family, and this is only worsened with the migrants assets bill. The migrants assets bill also gives the police and authorities the right to search clothes and luggage of asylum seekers at any time (also when in the asylum system), and to confiscate valuables and cash worth more than approx. 1.340 Euros (10.000 Danish Kroner). As it is stated in the government’s instructions to the police (Vejledning om visitation, ransagning og beslaglæggelse hos asylansøgere mv.; Vejl 9069 af 5/2 2016), the valuables can be taken from the asylum seekers if they cannot tell a sentimental story which proves that the valuable is beyond market-value. Similar measures are already in play in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany. The most relevant parts of the Danish Alien Act in regards to the motivation-enhancement measures are § 34, 2 and § 42a, 4-11. These paragraphs state that the police can require that the person reports to them if they are deemed uncooperative, do not come to the meetings with the authorities concerning their case, have shown violent behavior, do not stay where they have been assigned to stay by the Danish Immigration Service, or if the police is taking care of the deportation of the person and the latter does not collaborate. As we already mentioned in point 3, § 42a, 5 of the Danish Alien Act states that the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for handling the overall management of the centers, and that it can allocate these responsibilities to governmental or nongovernmental organizations. In practice this means that it is up to the organization that handles the specific camps to put the motivation-enhancement measures into practice. As any other asylum seekers in Denmark, people in Sjælsmark are not allowed to work or to study. But, according to § 42a, 11 and 12, the asylum seekers whose cases have been rejected by the Danish state do not get any pocket money, and they are not allowed to cook their own food. They get a bed in shared dormitories and food three times a day. In Sjælsmark the Danish Prison and Probation Service execute the motivation enhancement measures. In face of all of this we have to ask: is a country democratic when laws are passed in spite of their deeply problematic character, in spite of international rejection, in spite of their violating human rights conventions? And even more preoccupying: what is the state of democracy in a country where these repressive laws are passed, and reliable information about them, their connection to larger imperial and neoliberal interests, and their historical antecedents in Europe is not available for the larger public?
12. We struggle for life and dignity, we forge freedom.
The global expansion of the camps corresponds with the global expansion of transnational corporations like G4S. As Angela Davis has said, the so-called wars for democracy carried out by western powers in the global south “use capitalism as its model, that sees the free market as the paradigm for freedom and that sees competition as the paradigm for freedom”. This is intimately linked to the social killing that takes place in camps, and to the cutbacks to education and health care in Denmark: the neoliberal idea of economic freedom requires that the state retracts from all social services. In this logic freedom emerges because the market determines the distribution of education, health and so on, as if by divine providence. We know that this logic of freedom is inherently murderous, racist, anti democratic and patriarchal. We know that this kind of freedom depends on global social inequalities, of the exploitation and war in our countries, and on keeping us segregated and dehumanized in Europe: we live this reality and it is killing us slowly. We also know that our struggle itself is resistance to social death and it forges our right to participate in political and civil life. Our struggle is the very practice of freedom; it is an exercise of life.
Until now we have had three demonstrations: we have walked from Sjælsmark deportation camp to Sandholm camp. We had a demonstration in Allerød, and another in the streets of Copenhagen. We have resisted social, civil and political death. We have challenged the idea that we cannot be visible, that we do not have the right to have rights, and that we cannot contribute to society. Through these mobilizations we have built a community with refugees from other camps, immigrants, danes and non-danes who understand that our struggle is legitimate and just. We have brought to public attention the inhumane conditions in Sjælsmark, the deportations, and the unjust laws and policies that violate our freedom and dignity. We now take the struggle a step further, and continue forging our freedom. We do not wait for anyone to give us rights. We take the right to participate in the construction of a world where freedom of movement is not a privilege for the few, where the camps are abolished, and where it is unthinkable to create death and destruction. We welcome more people to join this struggle, people who understand that our struggle is necessary and just: Join us on the 27th of April in front of the Danish Immigration Service at 3pm.
Copenhagen, April 24, 2016
Castaway Souls of Sjælsmark
Freedom of Movements
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