February 1, 2020

Trump’s Travel Ban Expanded

President Donald Trump is expanding his controversial travel ban to include six more countries.

Trump’s Travel Ban Expanded
HuffPost

LAGOS (Reuters) - Eritrea denounced a U.S. ban on immigrant visas for its citizens as "unacceptable" on Saturday, while Nigeria's government said it had created a committee to address the issues that prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to add the country to the ban.

Nigeria and Eritrea were among six countries, four of them in Africa, added to an expanded version of the U.S. visa ban announced on Friday in a presidential proclamation.

U.S. officials said the countries failed to meet U.S. security and information-sharing standards, which necessitated the new restrictions.

"Nigeria remains committed to maintaining productive relations with the United States and other international allies especially on matters of global security," a Nigerian presidential statement said.

Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, is the biggest country on the list whose citizens will be suspended from U.S. visas that can lead to permanent residency. Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar were also slapped with a similar ban.

Nigeria's information minister told Reuters they had no warning of their inclusion on the list before it appeared in the media. [L8N29W549]

Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh Mohammed said the government saw the ban as a political move that would hurt the country's relations with the United States.

"We find this move unacceptable," he told Reuters by telephone. "We will, however, not expel the U.S. ambassador," he added.

The U.S. government also said it will stop issuing "diversity visas" to nationals of Sudan and Tanzania.

The visas, which Trump has criticized, are available by lottery for applicants from countries with low rates of immigration.

(Reporting by Libby George in Lagos and Felix Onuah in Abuja Additional report by Giulia Paravicini in Addis Ababa; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Helen Popper)

Source=https://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-creates-committee-tackle-issues-145352173.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20vc2VhcmNoP3E9ZXJpdHJlYStibGFzdHMrdS5zLit2aXNhK2JhbiUyQytuaWdlcmlhK2NyZWF0ZXMrY29tbWl0dGVlK3RvK2FkZHJlc3MraXNzdWVzJmZvcm09RURHVENUJnFzPVBGJmN2aWQ9MDc1Y2YxM2YxMDdjNDhhMGJiNThlZmFlM2NmYTI0MjYmcmVmaWc9YmRmYTU5YTQxNDZhNDQwY2UxYmM5ZTM4MzUwOTc4MzcmY2M9U0Umc2V0bGFuZz1lbi1VUyZlbHY9QVkzJTIxdUFZN3RiTk5aR1oyeWlHTmpmT0Vidnc2MXFlZDZMN0xIZmhWbkVhVUtwaG9mVjg0NDQzMGQzb044R2E5aVd6b3JqajVlYW4zbEV0NEJUSkxERWtXRnRyY2RXeW1GQWFYU2JUcHRzdkcmcGx2YXI9MCZQQz1MQ1RT&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAARIvAqGMOiUzx2mMfRm1qU7q5UJvm5wxBLwATLIuLdTwqj-W2uWPbJx4CToYH8bqzworh9rOoyhvUDtnSQuKUYxkSOBmnwyv5rgFBZItGawBZdnsqNNzQyX9m3KZvQlFNEPNRCp4eWyFkqGpOvJDRnxdcRWixK0ryJgsCpy9JgB

U.S. expanding immigrant limits

Saturday, 01 February 2020 21:19 Written by
story.lead_photo.caption In this Sept. 2017 file photo, a flag is waved outside the White House, in Washington. The Trump administration announced Friday that it was curbing legal immigration from six additional countries that officials said did not meet security screening standards, as part of an election-year push to further restrict immigration. Officials said immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania will face new restrictions in obtaining certain visas to come to the United States. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration announced Friday that it was restricting immigrants from six additional countries that officials said failed to meet minimum security standards.

Officials said immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, Burma, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania will face new restrictions in obtaining certain visas to come to the United States. But it is not a total travel ban, unlike President Donald Trump's earlier effort that generated anger around the world for targeting Muslims.

Trump signed a proclamation on the restrictions Friday; they take effect Feb. 21.

The announcement came as Trump tries to promote his crackdown on immigration, highlighting a signature issue that motivated supporters in 2016. The administration recently announced birth tourism restrictions, and it is touting the sharp decline in crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and citing progress on building the border wall.

"It is fundamental to national security, and the height of common sense, that if a foreign nation wishes to receive the benefits of immigration and travel to the United States, it must satisfy basic security conditions outlined by America's law enforcement and intelligence professionals," the White House said in a statement.

Kyrgyzstan, Burma, Eritrea and Nigeria are to see all immigrant visas suspended; those are applicants seeking to live in the U.S. permanently. They include visas for people sponsored by family members or employers as well as the diversity visa program that made up to 55,000 visas available in the most recent lottery.

In December, for example, 40,666 immigrant visas were granted, with the State Department using a computer drawing to select people from around the world.

Sudan and Tanzania will have diversity visas suspended. Nigeria is already excluded from the lottery along with other countries that had more than 50,000 natives immigrate to the U.S. in the previous five years.

Nonimmigrant visas are not affected. They are awarded to those traveling to the U.S. for a temporary stay, including visas for tourists, those doing business and people seeking medical treatment. During December, for example, about 650,760 nonimmigrant visas were granted worldwide.

The new restrictions were met with criticism from immigrant advocates, who slammed them as a new Muslim ban.

Sudan and Kyrgyzstan are majority-Muslim countries. Nigeria, the seventh-most-populous nation in the world with more than 200 million people, is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims but has the world's fifth-largest population of Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center.

Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, said the previous visa restrictions should not be expanded.

"President Trump is doubling down on his signature anti-Muslim policy -- and using the ban as a way to put even more of his prejudices into practice by excluding more communities of color," he said, saying families, universities and businesses in the United States would be affected the most.

Rumors swirled for weeks about a potential new ban, and initially Belarus was considered. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was headed to the Eastern European nation as the restrictions were announced, and Belarus was not on the list.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Homeland Security officials would work with the countries on bolstering their security requirements to help them work to get off the list. Wolf said some nations were able to comply with the new standards in time.

"These countries for the most part want to be helpful, they want to do the right thing, they have relationships with the U.S., but for a variety of different reasons failed to meet those minimum requirements," Wolf said.

The current restrictions follow Trump's travel ban, which the Supreme Court upheld as lawful in 2018. They are significantly softer than Trump's initial ban, which had suspended travel from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for 90 days, blocked refugee admissions for 120 days, and suspended travel from Syria. The government suspended most immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to applicants from those countries. Exceptions are available for students and those with "significant contacts" in the U.S.

Trump has said a travel ban is necessary to protect Americans. But opponents have argued that he seeks to target Muslim countries, pointing to comments he made as a candidate in 2015 calling for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

The seven countries in the travel ban include nations with little or no diplomatic relationship to the U.S. and five majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Observers had expected a new announcement around the third anniversary of the Jan. 27, 2017, enactment of the first order.

A Section on 02/01/2020

Print Headline: U.S. expanding immigrant limits

Source=https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/feb/01/u-s-expanding-immigrant-limits-20200201/

Ethiopia’s navy is reborn – in Djibouti

Saturday, 01 February 2020 11:28 Written by

February 1, 2020 Ethiopia, News

The revival of Ethiopian Navy, the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea, Regional power dynamics

Special for Africa ExPress
Makeda Saba
24 January 2020

The modern Ethiopian Navy was established by Emperor Haile Selassie, with the assistance of the United Kingdon, in 1955 and had its Naval Headquarters in Massawa with presence in: Assab; Dhalak Islands and Asmara.

In 1991, at the end of the Eritrean war for independence, Ethiopia became a landlocked country. For a while, the Ethiopian Navy continued to patrol the Red Sea, using Yemen as its operational base. By 1993 operations from Yemen ceased and the Ethiopian Navy moved to Djibouti. Though the Ethiopian Government attempted to negotiate, with Eritrea, access for its Navy to Assab, this was not an arrangement that newly independent State of Eritrea could accept.

Djibuti to host Ethiopia’s Navy

Even though, Eritrea did not allow Ethiopia to establish a Naval presence in Assab, at the time it did seek Ethiopian support during it dispute with Yemen over the Hanish Islands. Hence, Ethiopia leased to Eritrea (1996) 4 military helicopters. These helicopters were never returned to Ethiopia as by 1998 the Eritrea/Ethiopia border war started.[i]

By 1996 the Ethiopian Navy ceased to exist. However, Ethiopia’s commercial fleet continued to access both the port of Massawa and Assab. This activity ended when the Eritrea/ Ethiopia border war started in 1998.[ii] Therefore, Ethiopia with a population of over 100 million people, became totally dependent on Djibouti for commercial access to the sea. [iii]

Since 1998, realising the vulnerability of depending on only one port, Ethiopia has adopted a strategy of diversification of port access both on the Red Sea as well as the Indian Ocean. Therefore, it has negotiated access to ports in Djibouti, Somalia (Berbera); Kenya (Mombasa; Lamu); Sudan (Port Sudan). In the port of Berbera, the Ethiopian government has acquired a 19% interest in the development of the port. The other partners in the project are DP World with a 51% share: and Somaliland with a 30% share. [iv] The Ethiopian government has also negotiated an ownership share in the port of Djibouti [v] as well as Port Sudan.[vi] And, it has been busy developing the infrastructure to connect Ethiopia to the ports such as the rail link to Djibouti[vii]; the road links to Berbera[viii] and Lamu. [ix]

Ethiopia is not the only State seeking to establish a strategic presence along the shipping routes of the Bab al Mandab Strait and the Suez Canal. A route that links the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.  In recent years, China; Turkey, United Arab Emirates (UAE) have, in addition to economic presence, secured a military presence in an effort to secure the shipping lane from pirate and other interferences. [x]

Since the events of the Arab Spring in 2011 both Saudi Arabia and UAE started to focus on the East and Horn of Africa as strategic for their efforts to counter and minimize the reach and influence of Iran and possibly contain ‘Arab Spring Like “democratising events. Both governments are absolute monarchies who according to Dr Mehari Taddele Maru[xi]:

“…. [totally] reject any form of republican democratic rule. As a result, they are resistant to any kind of democratic dispensation in the region as well as the Horn of Africa……. [The] monarchs of these two countries…. [ consider] that any democratic dispensation in the region could …[threaten] their power.”

In the Horn of Africa, the Saudi and UAE governments have acquire interests in the management of key port facilities (Djibouti, Berbera; Port Sudan), they have also established military bases in Somalia (Mogadishu); on the Yemeni Island of Socotra as well as in Eritrea (Assab). From Assab the Saudi/UAE coalition are launching military operations against Yemen as well as carrying out training of Yemeni counterterrorism forces. The Saudi/UAE coalition also provides equipment to the trained Yemeni counterterrorism forces.

The expanding UAE/Saudi influence in the Horn of Africa region, was recently evidenced in June 2018:

“…. [when] Eritrea and Ethiopia announced – after a flurry of visits to and from Emirati officials – that they had reached an agreement to end their thirty-year war.

The ending of the “No Peace and No War” status between Eritrea and Ethiopia, was followed by the: opening of land borders; lifting of UN sanctions on Eritrea; re-establishing of telecommunication links as well as air transport. For the first time, in more than twenty years, Ethiopian ships docked in the Eritrean ports of Massawa and Assab fuelling the hope of future trade and economic normalisation between the two countries and, there were visions of road and possibly rail networks linking the two countries.

However, as of December 2018, all the land borders between Eritrea and Ethiopia are closed. And, there is no clear and transparent process addressing the border issues between the two countries or the economic and trade normalisation. The peace process between the two countries, is stagnating as is highlighted by such events as the failure of President Isaias Afwerki to accept, for more than 18 months, the credentials of the Ethiopian Ambassador H.E. Redwan Hussein. A situation that was remedied only in December 2019 after the intervention of the UAE. [xii]

Thoughthis stagnation is not ideal, it may be a situation that Prime Minister Abiy is temporarily happy to live with, as he works to: (i) transition the country away from a command style economy as well as a political environment dominated by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and, by extension the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF); (ii) prepare the country  for the general elections in 2020; (iii)  assert the role of Ethiopia as a regional power and, (iv) protect her interests by securing negotiated access to multiple port facilities; as well as projecting military power.

Abiy Ahmed, primo ministro dell’Etiopia

According to a BBC report [xiii] the Ethiopian government became very concerned that: “that Djibouti was controlled by foreign naval forces. US, China, Japan and France ….”.  Therefore, aware of the strategic and political threat posed to the Ethiopian interest  by: (i) the presence of foreign military powers along the coastal areas of the Horn of Africa; (ii) piracy; (iii)human trafficking;  as well as (iv) the ongoing proxy war between Saudi Arabia/UAE coalition and Iran in Yemen; the Ethiopia government, in addition to a strategy of diversifying its access to ports, has also adopted a strategy of boosting its military presence in the region by establishing a Navy to protect its interest in the shipping routes of the Bab al Mandab Strait with a focus on both the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.[xiv]

The formation of the new Ethiopian Navy is an initiative that has received support from France. Who, in March 2019 agreed, as part of its own endeavours to boost its economic ties with the country, to help the Ethiopian government to build a navy.[xv] According to Capital Ethiopia the new navy[xvi]: “… [ will] be based in Djibouti”? A location that is facilitated by the existing infrastructure links such as roads and rail.

In addition to the economic and military efforts, the Ethiopian government is also working at the diplomatic level to maintain political relationships with all the foreign powers with an interest in the Horn of Africa and, the shipping routes of the Bab al Mandab Strait.  This diplomatic engagement includes Qatar, who is a rival of the Saudi and UAE. Hence, the President of Ethiopia – Sahle Work Zewde, has recently met with the Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, H.E Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, to review bilateral relationships between the two states and how to improve them. [xvii]

To date, though Eritrean government websites such as TesfaNews have reported on the formation of the new Ethiopian navy and its location in Djibouti, officially the Eritrean government has not reacted. Despite the efforts of the Saudi/Emirate coalition, as well as the Ethiopian government, the relationship between Eritrea and Djibouti is also not progressing to address outstanding issues of the Eritrea/Djibouti border; as well as the fate of Djiboutian soldiers missing in action since 2008.[xviii] Hence, It is possible that the Eritrean government will interpret the presence of an Ethiopian navy in Djibouti as a threat and a further justification to maintain  a policy of  indefinite National Service.

February 1, 2020 Ethiopia, News

Source: Reuters

Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan say final agreement on Blue Nile dam ready by next month

The Blue Nile flows into Ethiopia’s Great Renaissance Dam in Guba Woreda, some 40 km (25 miles) from Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, on June 28, 2013. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri

The countries have been at odds over the filling and operation of the $4 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), under construction near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan on the Blue Nile, which flows into the Nile river.

The three regional powers convened in Washington for what were supposed to be two days of meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday to complete an agreement after talks earlier this month, but negotiations dragged into Friday and disbanded without a final accord.

In a joint statement with the United States and the World Bank after the talks, the nations said they had agreed on a schedule for staged filling of the dam and mitigation mechanisms to adjust its filling and operation during dry periods and drought.

The nations still have to finalize several aspects of the dam, including its safety and provisions for the resolution of disputes, the statement said. But it added that a final agreement on the dam would be signed by all three countries by the end of February.

“Documents to be signed will be further deliberated by legal team supported by technical team. This will continue next week to complete comprehensive document within 30 days,” Sileshi Bekele, Ethiopian minister for water, irrigation and energy, said on Twitter.

The United States has hosted several rounds of talks in Washington with ministers from the three regional powers and the World Bank after years of trilateral negotiations failed.

U.S. President Donald Trump, in a call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Friday, expressed optimism that an agreement on the dam was near and would benefit all parties involved, a White House spokesman said.

The dam is the centerpiece in Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter but has sparked fears in Cairo that Egypt’s already scarce supplies of Nile waters, on which its population of more than 100 million people is almost entirely dependent, would be further restricted.

Even without taking the dam into account, largely desert Egypt is short of water. It imports about half its food products and recycles about 25 billion cubic meters of water annually.

Addis Ababa, which announced the project in 2011 as Egypt was beset by political upheaval, denies the dam will undermine Egypt’s access to water.

January 30, 2020 News

Source: Statewatch

Analysis

Italy guilty of refoulements in 2009 handover of Eritrean shipwreck survivors to Libya

Yasha Maccanico January 2020

An Italian court has ruled that the country’s Cabinet presidency and defence ministry were responsible for the refoulement of 14 Eritrean nationals in July 2009, when a warship rescued some 80 people and took them back to Libya, ignoring requests for international protection.

Screenshot 2020-01-30 at 12.00.14

On 14 November 2019, the first section of the Rome civil court ruled on a case brought by 14 Eritrean nationals against the interior, defence and foreign affairs ministries and the Cabinet presidency, for a collective refoulement at sea on 1 July 2009. The court, presided over by judge Monica Velletti, handed down a sentence upholding the claims made by the 14. The Italian state has been ordered to pay €15,000 in compensation to each individual and to permit them entry into Italy to apply for international protection.1

This sentence upholds several basic legal principles that are being actively undermined by current EU and Italian efforts to prevent sea crossings in cooperation with the so-called Libyan coastguard. In particular, the sentence clarifies that an act undertaken in accordance with an Italian ministerial decree against irregular migration and a bilateral treaty between Italy and Libya does not allow authorities to disregard the international, EU and national legal frameworks – the latter take precedence over the former.

The normative framework that applied at the time obliged Italian authorities to accept the submission of asylum claims and prohibited refoulements to unsafe territories. 2 This reasoning could be extended to the so-called “code of conduct” for NGOs3 that seeks to subordinate the law of the sea to instrumental measures aimed at obstructing rescues by civilians and to operative arrangements giving the so-called Libyan coastguard exclusive responsibility for maritime rescues in the central Mediterranean.

1 Sentence no. 22917/2019, first civil section of the Rome Court, published on 28 November 2019, p. 17, http://statewatch.org/news/2020/jan/it-refoulement-eritrean-refugees-judgment-11-19.pdf
2 Ibid, pp. 10-11.
3 ‘Italy’s proposed code of conduct for Mediterranean NGOs “threatens life-saving operations”’, Statewatch News ̧11 July 2017, http://statewatch.org/news/2017/jul/med-ngo-code.htm

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Two organisation involved in the case, Amnesty International (AI) and ASGI (Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione), described this sentence as “historic” for its interpretation of Article 10.3 of the Italian Constitution that safeguards the right to seek asylum, and in relation to policies to externalise the EU’s border control and restrictive immigration policies.4 A wide reading of this point makes it conceivable that thousands of people were denied the opportunity to apply for asylum as a result of the EU’s externalisation of border management to Libyan authorities in the Mediterranean. In fact, the statement by AI and ASGI stresses that the outcome of such practices has amounted to preventing access to protection for people taken back to Libya.

Facts of the case

After fleeing their country, the Eritrean plaintiffs embarked from the Libyan coast on 27 June 2009 to reach Italy and seek international protection. Their vessel had an engine failure on 30 June in the high sea off Lampedusa that left it at the sea’s mercy until an Italian Navy ship, the Orione, intervened to rescue its 89 passengers. They were transferred on board, searched, had some personal effects confiscated (including photographs, money and documents), were photographed and issued an identification number. They were assured that they would be taken to Italian territory, where they could have applied for international protection.

In the early hours of 1 July, the rescued people realised that the Orione was heading for Libya and began complaining. They panicked when a Libyan vessel flanked the Orione, and many of them started shouting that they were seeking international protection and asylum, begging not to be handed over to the Libyans because they had been tortured, imprisoned and persecuted in Libya. Nonetheless, they were handed over and transferred onto the Libyan vessel, where they were cuffed with plastic handcuffs.

Hence, the plaintiffs argue that they were collectively refused entry without undergoing any formal procedures, in violation of Italian and international law. They were denied access to procedures to obtain international protection and were returned to Libya, where they were brutally and indiscriminately beaten and detained for several months in inhuman and degrading conditions.

The plaintiffs then tried to reach Europe by land, across Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, reaching Israel in 2010, where they were arrested before being released without any guarantees. They argue that their fundamental rights are being violated, that they are experiencing inhuman and degrading treatment at the hands of the Israeli authorities and face a risk of refoulement to Eritrea. On 25 June 2014, the plaintiffs sent a formal notification of their plight and complaints to the accused Italian authorities, which failed to acknowledge receipt. They demanded damage payments and for action to be taken to curtail violation of their rights by allowing them to enter Italian territory and apply for protection. Their demands in this civil case are for admission into Italian territory, with all the consequences this implies, and payment of €30,000 in damages for each plaintiff for a failure to adopt necessary measures to allow entry for the purpose of requesting protection.

4 Respingimenti e richiesta d’asilo. Importante sentenza del Tribunale civile di Roma. Grande la soddisfazione di Amnesty International Italia e ASGI, 3.12.2019, http://www.cronachediordinariorazzismo.org/respingimenti-e-richiesta-dasilo-importante-sentenza-del- tribunale-civile-di-roma-grande-la-soddisfazione-di-amnesty-international-italia-e-asgi/

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Preliminary objections advanced by the defendant administrations

The ministries and Cabinet presidency asked that the court reject the claims. They argued that 82 people were rescued in the incident (rather than 89), that the rescue was in international waters 26 nautical miles south of Lampedusa, and that none of the migrants expressed their wish to seek asylum. The defendants also argued that the handover complied with the 2008 Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya and with Article 1.4 of an Italian ministerial decree of 14 July 2003. For these reasons, they asked the court to deem the case unfounded and inadmissible, because the plaintiffs were not legitimated to act, the statute of limitations had intervened for their damage claims, and the demands should be rejected as unfounded and not proven. The plaintiffs’ precautionary request was rejected on these grounds on 23 November 2016, because it was impossible to state with certainty that the plaintiffs were involved in the rescue and because of the time that had elapsed since the events.

Three witnesses were heard by the court – two of whom attempted the crossing with the plaintiffs and a third one had met them in Israel whilst working for Amnesty International – and documents were submitted by both parties. The plaintiffs’ identity as the people involved in the rescue was established using photographs taken on the Orione ship while the survivors held the identification numbers given to them, and those taken at Amnesty International’s office in Israel. The witness’s testimonies were useful for this purpose, providing positive identification of subjects whose names did not appear in the images and confirmation of further elements described by the plaintiffs. Thus, the court agreed they had a legal right to act in these proceedings.

Another preliminary objection raised by the defendant administrations concerned expiry of the five-year term for damage payments. The plaintiffs deemed that their communication to notify Italian administrations of the situation had interrupted the statute of limitations from intervening, despite not receiving confirmation of its receipt from the addressees. The Italian authorities deemed that the period to be considered was from 30 June 2009 to 7 January 2016, whereas the recorded delivery from the plaintiffs was dated 25 June 2014, just before the expiry of five years after the events. The defendant administrations are deemed to have responded to the claim after the deadline within which they could have raised this exception and, in any case, the court deems the recorded delivery suitable to interrupt the statute of limitation from intervening. Thus, the request for damages was admitted.

Similar reconstructions, divergent interpretations

Regarding damage compensation, based on both parties’ testimonies, the documents they submitted and witness accounts of incident, several points were ascertained. On 30 June 2009, the Italian Navy carried out a rescue operation of a group of around 80 people who were transferred onto an Italian vessel that headed towards Libya; data from the administration showed the rescue took place in international waters, 26 miles south of Lampedusa; on 1 July 2009 the migrants were photographed, assigned an identification number and handed over to the Libyan authorities. Witnesses confirmed the plaintiffs’ account that they were told they were heading towards Italy, that they said they did not want to return to Libya because they were refugees and wished to apply for international protection, when they found out that they were being returned to Libya. It was also confirmed that the rescued people were handed over to the Libyans without having the opportunity to lodge asylum applications. The parties’ reconstructions of events were similar, although their understandings differed regarding the

Italy guilty of refoulements to Libya | www.statewatch.org | 3

legality of the Italian authorities’ actions, namely the rescue and subsequent handover to the Libyan authorities. The plaintiffs argued that – aside from facing a violation of the non-refoulement principle and denial of access to asylum proceedings – they were consigned to an unsafe place. Collective refoulement with no examination of individual circumstances and the de facto denial of access to international protection breaches the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugee status, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UN Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Montego Bay Convention, the Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea, the Treaty of the European Union, the Schengen Borders Code (at the time, EC Regulation 526/2006), and the Refugee Procedures Directive (2004/83/EC) laying down minimum standards for refugee status recognition transposed into Italian laws no. 25/2008 and no. 286/1998. The Hirsi Jamaa et al vs. Italy sentence of 23 February 2012,5 in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found Italy guilty in a case involving returns to Libya by the Italian Navy, served as a precedent.

The defendant administrations disagreed, arguing that the actions adopted were lawful, in accordance with Article 1.4 of a ministerial decree of 14 July 2003 on countering irregular migration and the 2008 Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Collaboration with Libya.6 The Italian authorities had merely executed the contents of an international agreement, within that normative framework. However, the sentence makes clear that lawfulness of the action must be assessed in the light of the entire normative framework that applied at the time.

The Geneva Convention sets out the non-refoulement principle that forbids expulsion or refusal of entry leading to the return of individuals to territories where their life or well-being are at risk. UNHCR deems this a fundamental principle that does not allow exceptions connected to the right to seek asylum (UDHR) and the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (ECHR, art. 3). The 4th Protocol to the ECHR states: “The collective expulsion of foreigners is prohibited.” Such rights are guaranteed in Italian laws including the Constitution’s recognition of the right to asylum (Article 10.3), and the inclusion in EU law of principles guaranteed under international law, including the non-refoulement principle, as found in Article 19 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The ECtHR’s judgment in Hirsii Jamaa is relevant to appreciate these measures’ scope and substance, viewed as the premises for which Italy was found guilty in a case that shares several features with this one. UNHCR deems this principle to apply whenever an act by a state may lead to the return of an asylum seeker or refugee towards the border of a territory where their life or freedom would be at risk and they may face persecution. It may apply to refusal of entry at the border, interception and indirect refoulement, whether it concerns a person seeking asylum or a substantial population’s movement, and it applies when refugee status has not yet been granted, also in the high seas. The non-refoulement principle’s intimate connection to the right to seek asylum (Article 14 UDHR) means that everyone has a

5 European Court of Human Rights, Grand Chamber, Hirsi Jamaa and others vs. Italy (no. 27765/09), Judgement, Strasbourg, 23.2.2012, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{“itemid”:[“001-109231”]}
6 On the aftermath at the time of the Arab Spring uprisings, see “The EU’s self-interested response to unrest in north Africa: the meaning of treaties and readmission agreements between Italy and north African states”, Statewatch news online, Jan. 2012, http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-165-eu- north-africa.pdf . On the situation at the time of the treaty, see “Relaciones peligrosas: el acercamiento italo-líbico y sus efectos para los migrantes”, Informe Derechos Humanos en la Frontera Sur 2008, Asociación pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía, pp. 80-90, https://www.apdha.org/media/fronterasur2008.pdf .

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right to seek and enjoy protection from persecution in other countries. This juridical situation falls within customary international law and is binding for all states. Article 3 of the ECHR forbids torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment and, in combination with Article 33 of the Geneva Convention, this also applies when people refused entry or turned back risk undergoing torture or other inhumane or degrading treatment.

In the Hirsi Jamaa et al vs. Italy case, among others, the ECtHR established that a person must not be removed if they run the risk of prohibited treatment in the destination country, a condition that the returning state must check. In situations where human rights violations are systematic, this means the returning state must find out to what treatment returnees would be subjected, and the failure to submit an asylum application does not allow states to disregard this duty. Thus, even in the absence of explicit asylum requests, states should not ignore the possibility that a return may lead people to experience cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The 4th Protocol to the ECHR forbids collective refoulement and the Hirsi Jamaa case established that this applies beyond national borders and, in particular, on the high seas. The sentence upheld the criterion that states cannot expel groups of foreigners without examining their individual cases.

The decision

In light of the above normative framework, if a state’s authorities intercept migrants at sea their cases should be examined individually and they have a duty not to expel refugees to territories where their life or freedom would be in peril, and where they may risk persecution. The failure to submit an asylum application does not allow states to ignore the systematic violation of human rights in some countries.

In the case of Libya, this was documented in several reports issued between 2006 and 2010 by international organisations – Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International and the US State Department. Italian authorities should have been aware that Libya has not ratified the Geneva Convention, does not have a national asylum system and could not be considered safe. There was a concrete risk of migrants being detained, subjected to violence or deported to Eritrea, a country for which several reports documented systematic violations of human rights by the government, including torture, arbitrary arrest, inhuman detention conditions, forced labour, serious restrictions on freedom of movement, expression and worship. The Hirsi Jamaa judgment explicitly recalled relevant reports by the UN Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The measures recalled by the defendant authorities, including the international agreement between Italy and Libya, function within this normative and factual context. Even if one were to accept that the agreement expressly provided for the return to Libya of migrants intercepted in the high seas (which it does not explicitly mention), this would not relieve Italy of its obligations under international legal instruments it has ratified. Italy cannot relinquish its responsibilities by evoking duties that may arise from bilateral agreements with Libya, which must give way to Constitutional and supranational prescriptions – Article 10 of the Constitution and Articles 18 and 19 of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights.

Furthermore, the 2008 Treaty of Friendship with Libya is not limited to allowing returns, but in Article 1 it claims compliance with international law by recalling their duties deriving from its universally recognised principles and norms. Therefore, the Italian authorities’ actions contravened their obligations under Italian constitutional law and international law.

Italy guilty of refoulements to Libya | www.statewatch.org | 5

Additionally, the Hirsi Jamaa et al ECtHR sentence in 2012 obliged Italy to pay compensation to a group of Somali and Eritrean migrants in similar circumstances (a rescue by the Italian Guardia di Finanza – customs police – and Coast Guard on 6 May 2009, 35 nautical miles south of Lampedusa in Malta’s SAR zone, followed by the handover of the individuals to Libyan authorities without allowing them to request international protection).

Having ascertained that this conduct contravenes juridical norms, the court sought to clarify that Italian authorities were aware or could have been aware that Libya should not be considered a place of safety due to the existence of several reports by international organisations. Thus, the authorities concerned are guilty and are objectively responsible, meaning that the damage incurred should be identified, not in terms of monetary damage, but that connected to the serious violation of people’s basic rights that cannot be contravened and are protected by the Constitution, including the right to apply for international protection. Such damage must be alleged and proven by those seeking compensation. In this case, the plaintiffs have alleged experiencing harm including the suffering they underwent and risks to protected goods like health, psycho-physical well-being and personal freedom, that resulted from being returned to an unsafe country. The negative repercussions that actually affect a person harmed by a crime or breach of people’s inviolable rights must be identified.

In this instance, these considerations apply to denial of access to asylum procedures intimately connected to the refusal of entry and the harm suffered as a result of forced return to Libya, where imprisonment, torture and violence occurred. Equitable damage payments are necessary, and the relevant reference is the Hirsi Jamaa case, in which they amounted to 15,000 euros, rather than the 30,000 euros requested by the plaintiffs in this case, whose characteristics are similar. The defence ministry and the presidency of the Cabinet should pay this compensation. The latter is responsible for the Italian state’s actions in application of the Italy-Libya treaty, whereas Navy personnel physically carried out the refoulements. Neither the ministry for internal affairs nor the foreign affairs ministry were deemed responsible.

The plaintiffs also demanded that restrictions to their entry into Italian territory be lifted and that the defendant administrations act to make this possible, so that they may request international protection, to remove the harmful consequences of the unlawful conduct they underwent.

The administrations opposed this claim, arguing that the situation prior to the violations that have been identified could not be re-established, that the migrants were not in Italian territory but in international waters at the time of the rescue, and that boarding an Italian vessel did not automatically mean that they would have applied for or would have been granted international protection. However, witness accounts by people on board contradicted this claim because they declared that everyone expressly asked to apply for asylum or international protection when they first came into contact with Italian military personnel, as refugees from Eritrea.

The sentence rules that this claim does not require compensation, but rather, to demand verification of the right to apply for international protection. The administrations’ defence does not seem to apply, because once the rescued shipwreck victims were on board the Navy ship, they were in Italian territory. A comprehensive reading of Article 10.3 of the Constitution, rulings by the United Sections of the Court of Cassation (Italy’s highest appeal court) and by the Supreme Court consider the right to international protection as a perfect subject of law with constitutional and customary derivations. This means that the right to asylum in the Constitution may take the form of a right of access to submit an asylum application, when the

Italy guilty of refoulements to Libya | www.statewatch.org | 6

fact that an individual is not present in Italian territory is a result of unlawful acts by the administrations in question (a refoulement to Libya). This view is strengthened by evidence that, in 2019, serious and systematic human rights violations still take place in Eritrea, as certified by Human Rights Watch. The court thus also ruled that the plaintiffs may enter Italian territory to apply for protection.

Sources

Sentenza n. 22917/2019, first civil section of the Rome Court, published on 28.11.2019 (pdf) Respingimenti e richiesta d’asilo. Importante sentenza del Tribunale civile di Roma. Grande

la soddisfazione di Amnesty International Italia e ASGI, 3 December 2019

Statewatch does not have a corporate view, nor does it seek to create one, the views expressed are those of the author. Statewatch is not responsible for the content of external websites and inclusion of a link does not constitute an endorsement.

© Statewatch ISBN 978-1-874481-61-4. Personal usage as private individuals/”fair dealing” is allowed. We also welcome links to material on our site. Usage by those working for organisations is allowed only if the organisation holds an appropriate licence from the relevant reprographic rights organisation (e.g. Copyright Licensing Agency in the UK) with such usage being subject to the terms and conditions of that licence and to local copyright law.

Italy guilty of refoulements to Libya | www.statewatch.org | 7

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Italy guilty of refoulements to Libya | www.statewatch.org | 8

January 30, 2020 Uncategorized

Tesfanews has produced a report providing an official view of how the campaign against the massive threat from desert locusts is progressing.

This key finding suggests the problem is being dealt with:

Screenshot 2020-01-30 at 08.00.01

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation suggests that the battle is far from over. The crops may not have yet been ‘saved’ nor gange lands secured.

This is what the FAO’s latest update (Tuesday 28th January) says:

Eritrea. Ground control operations are underway against hopper groups that are fledging and forming adult groups on the northern and central coast. At least one swarm arrived on the southern coast near Assab on the 20th either from Yemen or Ethiopia.”

This plague is still very serious. As the FAO explained:

“Locusts will increase further as a new generation of breeding starts in the Horn of Africa

“The current Desert Locust situation remains extremely alarming and represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa. This will be further exacerbated by new breeding that has commenced, which will cause more locust infestations.”

January 30, 2020 News

The background to this ruling was the report carried by NRK that members of the Eritrean diaspora went a meeting celebrating Eritrean government policies, despite claiming asylum in Norway for having escaped indefinite conscription, or ‘National Service.’

This report is computer translated.

Liv Ekeberg, Sylo Taraku and Frode Hansen at the PFU meeting on 29 January.
Liv Ekeberg, Sylo Taraku and Frode Hansen at the PFU meeting on 29 January. (Photo: Erik Szabo)

PFU: NRK and Dagsrevyen did not break the good news for Norwegian Eritreans

NRK was not fielded in the Press’s Academic Committee for the much-discussed feature of Norwegian Eritreans at a party.

NRK did not break good press for a feature on Norwegian Eritreans in Dagsrevyen 2 September 2019, as well as an online article titled: “Norwegian Eritreans went to a party for the regime they fled from”.

This was stated by the Press’s Trade Committee (PFU) at Wednesday’s meeting.

The committee agreed, and several praised NRK for their journalism in the discussion round.

“They are nowhere near breaking the Weather Varsom poster,” said committee member Liv Ekeberg. 

The recommendation of the PFU Secretariat was also that NRK has not broken good press practice.

Read the case papers at PFU here!

Both the TV show and the webpage are about the 25th anniversary of the National Service and the Sawa recruiting school in Eritrea, and it turns out that this military duty service is the
main reason many Norwegian Eritreans have been granted asylum in Norway.

Complaints are Eritrean association in Oslo, and they believe NRK will come up with falsehoods about the event, and that the Weather-Varsom poster (VVP) has been broken on several points – including points 3.2 and 4.4.

Complainants believe, among other things, it is wrong that the party was for the regime in Eritrea or a celebration of the military service.

The recommendation of the PFU Secretariat states:

« NRK could have more clearly expressed the uncertainty as to whether the organizer had planned such a marking of the military service. The committee also sees that NRK in the online article addressed a formulation related to the advertisement, when NRK became aware of the complainant’s reaction, cf. VVP 4.13. This was also stated at the bottom of the article.

However, the Committee believes that this imprecision is not enough to trap NRK. The committee believes that at the time of publication NRK had sufficient grounds to describe the party in this way, cf. VVP 3.2 and 4.4.  

The committee also cannot see that the connection between previous cases of asylum fraud and the mention of the celebration is insignificant. In the last article, the association is not mentioned either. The committee also sees that one of the sources in the case nuances the motive for participating in the party. “.

Foreign Policy

Hundreds of thousands have fled dictatorship—only to face trafficking, exploitation and hostility throughout North Africa and the Sahel.

 

Immigration-protest-in-Israel

Eritrean refugees are one of the main groups in this protest against Israel's hard line on immigration, Tel Aviv, January 5, 2014. (Reuters/Nir Elias)

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled a repressive dictatorship since 2001. Their small northeast African country, which has a population of 4-5 million and was once touted as part of an African “renaissance,” is one of the largest per capita producers of asylum seekers in the world.

Many languish in desert camps. Some have been kidnapped, tortured and ransomed—or killed—in the Sinai. Others have been left to die in the Sahara or drowned in the Mediterranean. Still others have been attacked as foreigners in South Africa, threatened with mass detention in Israel or refused entry to the United States and Canada under post-9/11 “terrorism bars” based on their past association with an armed liberation movement—the one they are now fleeing.

AD Quality Auto360p720p1080p Top articles1/5READ MORETake Action Now: End Gun Violence

It’s not easy being Eritrean.

The most horrifying of their misfortunes—the kidnapping, torture and ransoming in Sinai—has generated attention in the media and among human rights organizations, as did the tragic shipwreck off Lampedusa Island in the Mediterranean. But the public response, like that to famine or natural disaster, tends to be emotive and ephemeral, turning the refugees into objects of pity or charity with little grasp of who they are, why they take such risks or what can be done to halt the hemorrhaging.

This is abetted by the Eritrean government, which masks the political origins of these flows by insisting they are “migrants,” not refugees, and no different from those of other poor countries like Eritrea’s neighbor and archenemy, Ethiopia. This fiction is convenient for destination countries struggling with rising ultra-nationalist movements and eager for a rationale to turn Eritreans (and others) away.

But this is not a human—or political—crisis amenable to simplistic solutions. Nor is it going away any time soon.

The Source

Eritrea’s history has been marked by conflict and controversy from the time its borders were determined on the battlefield between Italian and Abyssinian forces in the 1890s. A decade of British rule was followed by federation with and then annexation by Ethiopia. Finally in the 1990s, after a thirty-year war that pitted the nationalists, themselves divided among competing factions, against successive US- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian regimes, Eritrea gained recognition as a state.

Since then Eritrea has clashed with all of its neighbors, climaxing in an all-out border war with Ethiopia in 1998–2000 that triggered a rapid slide into repression and autocracy. The government has survived by conscripting the country’s youth into both military service and forced labor on state-controlled projects and businesses, while relying on its diaspora for financial support, even as it has produced a disproportionate share of the region’s refugees. This paradox underlines the strength of Eritrean identity, even among those who flee.

Eritrea is dominated by a single strong personality: former rebel commander, and now president, Isaias Afwerki. He has surrounded himself with weak institutions, and there is no viable successor in sight, though there are persistent rumors of a committee-in-waiting due to his failing health. Meanwhile, the three branches of government—nominally headed by a cabinet, a National Assembly and a High Court—provide a façade of institutional governance, though power is exercised through informal networks that shift and change at the president’s discretion. There is no organizational chart, nor is there a published national budget. Every important decision is made in secret.

The ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), a retooled version of the liberation army, functions as a mechanism for mobilizing and controlling the population. No other parties are permitted. Nor are non-governmental organizations—no independent trade unions, media, women’s organizations, student unions, charities, cultural associations, nothing. All but four religious denominations have been banned, and those that are permitted have had their leaderships compromised.

Refugees cite this lack of freedom—and fear of arrest should they question it—as one of the main reasons for their flight. But the camps in Ethiopia and Sudan reflect a highly unusual demographic: Most such populations are comprised of women, children and elderly men, but officials of the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ethiopia and Sudan say that among those registering in the camps there, close to half in recent years have been women and men under the age of 25. The common denominator among them is their refusal to accept an undefined, open-ended national service. This, more than any other single factor, is propelling the exodus.

The UNHCR has registered more than 300,000 Eritreans as refugees over the past decade, and many more have passed through Ethiopia and Sudan without being counted. The UNHCR representative in Sudan, Kai Lielsen, told me last year that he thought seventy to eighty percent of those who crossed into Sudan didn’t register and didn’t stay. Thus, a conservative estimate would put the total close to a million. For a country of only four to five million people, this is remarkable. And it is the combination of their vulnerability and their desperation that makes them easy marks.

The Trafficking

For years, the main refugee route ran through the Sahara to Libya and thence to Europe. When that was blocked by a pact between Libya and Italy in 2006, it shifted east to Egypt and Israel. Smugglers from the Arab tribe of Rashaida in northeastern Sudan worked with Sinai Bedouin to facilitate the transit, charging ever-higher fees until some realized they could make far more by ransoming those who were fleeing.

The smugglers-turned-traffickers eventually demanded as much as $40,000-$50,000, forcing families to sell property, exhaust life savings and tap relatives living abroad. As the voluntary flow dried up, they paid to have refugees kidnapped from UN-run camps after identifying those from urban, mostly Christian backgrounds (those most likely to have relatives in Europe and North America).

I spoke with one survivor in Israel last year whose story was typical. Philmon, a 28-year-old computer engineer, fled Eritrea in March 2012 after getting a tip he might be arrested for public statements critical of the country’s national service. Several weeks later, he was kidnapped from Sudan’s Shagara camp, taken with a truckload of others to a Bedouin outpost in the Sinai and ordered to call relatives to raise $3,500 for his release. “The beatings started the first day to make us pay faster,” he told me.

Philmon’s sister, who lived in Eritrea, paid the ransom, but he was sold to another smuggler and ransomed again, this time for $30,000. “The first was like an appetizer. This was the main course,” he said. Over the next month, he was repeatedly beaten, often while hung by his hands from the ceiling. Convinced he could never raise the full amount, he attempted suicide. “I dreamed of grabbing a pistol and taking as many of them as possible, saving one bullet for myself.”

Early on they broke one of his wrists. During many of his forced calls home to beg for money they dripped molten plastic on his hands and back. After his family sold virtually everything they had to raise the $30,000, he was released. But his hands were so damaged he could no longer grip anything. He couldn’t walk and had to be carried into Israel. Because he was a torture victim, he was sent to a shelter in Tel Aviv for medical care. In this regard, he was one of the lucky ones.

For some 35,000 Eritreans who have come to Israel since 2006, each day is suffused with uncertainty, as an anti-immigrant backlash builds. The government calls them “infiltrators,” not refugees, and threatens them with indefinite detention or—what many fear most—deportation to Eritrea. Philmon has moved on to Sweden, where the reception was more welcoming, though there, too, a virulent anti-immigrant movement is growing.

Last year, the Sinai operation began to contract due to a confluence of factors: increased refugee awareness of the risks, the effective sealing of Israel’s border to keep them out and Egyptian efforts to suppress a simmering Sinai insurgency among Bedouin Islamists. But this didn’t stop the trafficking—it just rerouted it.

What I found in eastern Sudan last summer was that Rashaida tribesmen were paying bounties to corrupt officials and local residents to capture potential ransom victims along the Sudan-Eritrea border—and even within Eritrea and Ethiopia—and were holding them within well-defended Rashaida communities there. Such captives would not be counted by government or agency monitors and would not show up at all were it not for the testimony of escapees and relatives.

Last fall, Lampedusa survivors revealed that Libya is becoming another site for ransoming and kidnapping, illustrating that as one door closes, new opportunities arise across a region of weak states and post–Arab Uprising instability. What Sudan and Libya have in common is not the predators but the prey. And the practice is expanding as word spreads of the profits to be had, much as with the drug trade elsewhere. And it will continue to expand as long as there’s a large-scale migration of vulnerable people with access to funds and no coordinated international response to stop it.

Eritrean refugee flows today run in all directions. They’re facilitated by smugglers with regional and, in some cases, global reach. The gangs behind this engage in a range of criminal activities, within which human trafficking is just a lucrative new line of business. Some have ties to global cartels and syndicates. Some have political agendas and fund them through such enterprises. Most are heavily armed.

Under such conditions, a narrowly conceived security response could quickly spin out of control and escalate into a major counterinsurgency, as in the Sinai in Egypt. For weaker states across the Sahel, the risks of ill-thought-out action are infinitely greater.

What Needs to Happen

An effective approach to this crisis would start with education and empowerment of the target population and involve efforts to identify and protect refugees throughout their flight. A key step is the early, uncoerced determination of status according to international standards. This could be coupled with an expansion of incentives to deter onward migration, including education, training, employment and, where appropriate, integration into host communities. But none of this can work without refugee engagement in the process itself.

Then, and only then, would a security operation targeted at the smuggling and trafficking have a chance of success. But it, too, needs to be multidimensional in substance and regional in scope. Each state in this network is acting independently of the others. Sudan has arrested individuals implicated in trafficking, including one police officer, but has not cracked down on corrupt officials or gone into Rashaida communities to take down the ringleaders. Ethiopia has instituted security measures within the refugee camps on its northern border but is not working with Sudan on cross-border movement. Egypt has launched military operations in the Sinai where the torture camps are situated, but the announced aim is to break up the Islamist insurgency—the government denies trafficking is taking place. A coordinated initiative would start with a conference of affected states, and it would have to be supported by donor states and appropriate agencies (Interpol among them), not only in terms of aid but also intelligence, logistics, coordination and communication.

But if the trafficking operations are truly to be rolled up, the marginalized populations from which they arise and on which they depend need to be offered sufficient incentives to withdraw support for the criminals. This means access to resources, economic alternatives to off-the-books trading, involvement in the local political process, education for their children and more. These people need to be made stakeholders in the states where they live, which is not the case today for the Sinai Bedouin or the Sudan-based Rashaida or most of the other groups involved in trans-Sahel smuggling.

Meanwhile, to dry up this particular supply of prey, political change is needed at the source, in Eritrea. That means, at a minimum, opening up the political system and the economy, limiting (not necessarily ending) national service, releasing political prisoners, implementing the long-stalled constitution and ending controls on travel so those who do want to go abroad as migrant workers can do so without illegally crossing borders and going through illicit smuggling networks.

The most important thing the United States can do to facilitate this process is convince Ethiopia to back off the border dispute that centers on a frontier town, Badme, and accept in practice—not just rhetorically—the 2002 Border Commission ruling that went in Eritrea’s favor.

Ethiopia’s intransigence on this issue—and US inaction—has long been the Asmara regime’s most powerful argument for keeping the lid on all forms of dissent. Eritreans will simply not trust Washington—or Addis Ababa—until they see some evidence of good faith.

Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled a repressive dictatorship since 2001. Their small northeast African country, which has a population of four to five million and was once touted as part of an African “renaissance,” is one of the largest per capita producers of asylum seekers in the world.

Many languish in desert camps. Some have been kidnapped, tortured and ransomed—or killed—in the Sinai. Others have been left to die in the Sahara or drowned in the Mediterranean. Still others have been attacked as foreigners in South Africa, threatened with mass detention in Israel or refused entry to the United States and Canada under post-9/11 “terrorism bars” based on their past association with an armed liberation movement—the one they are now fleeing.

It’s not easy being Eritrean.

The most horrifying of their misfortunes—the kidnapping, torture and ransoming in Sinai—has generated attention in the media and among human rights organizations, as did the tragic shipwreck off Lampedusa Island in the Mediterranean. But the public response, like that to famine or natural disaster, tends to be emotive and ephemeral, turning the refugees into objects of pity or charity with little grasp of who they are, why they take such risks or what can be done to halt the hemorrhaging.

This is abetted by the Eritrean government, which masks the political origins of these flows by insisting they are “migrants,” not refugees, and no different from those of other poor countries like Eritrea’s neighbor and archenemy, Ethiopia. This fiction is convenient for destination countries struggling with rising ultra-nationalist movements and eager for a rationale to turn Eritreans (and others) away.

But this is not a human—or political—crisis amenable to simplistic solutions. Nor is it going away any time soon.

The Source

Eritrea’s history has been marked by conflict and controversy from the time its borders were determined on the battlefield between Italian and Abyssinian forces in the 1890s. A decade of British rule was followed by federation with and then annexation by Ethiopia. Finally in the 1990s, after a thirty-year war that pitted the nationalists, themselves divided among competing factions, against successive US- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian regimes, Eritrea gained recognition as a state.

Since then Eritrea has clashed with all of its neighbors, climaxing in an all-out border war with Ethiopia in 1998-2000 that triggered a rapid slide into repression and autocracy. The government has survived by conscripting the country’s youth into both military service and forced labor on state-controlled projects and businesses, while relying on its diaspora for financial support, even as it has produced a disproportionate share of the region’s refugees. This paradox underlines the strength of Eritrean identity, even among those who flee.

Eritrea is dominated by a single strong personality: former rebel commander, and now president, Isaias Afwerki. He has surrounded himself with weak institutions, and there is no viable successor in sight, though there are persistent rumors of a committee-in-waiting due to his failing health. Meanwhile, the three branches of government—nominally headed by a cabinet, a National Assembly and a High Court—provide a façade of institutional governance, though power is exercised through informal networks that shift and change at the president’s discretion. There is no organizational chart, nor is there a published national budget. Every important decision is made in secret.

The ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), a retooled version of the liberation army, functions as a mechanism for mobilizing and controlling the population. No other parties are permitted. Nor are non-governmental organizations—no independent trade unions, media, women’s organizations, student unions, charities, cultural associations, nothing. All but four religious denominations have been banned, and those that are permitted have had their leaderships compromised.

Refugees cite this lack of freedom—and fear of arrest should they question it—as one of the main reasons for their flight. But the camps in Ethiopia and Sudan reflect a highly unusual demographic: Most such populations are comprised of women, children and elderly men, but officials of the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ethiopia and Sudan say that among those registering in the camps there, close to half in recent years have been women and men under the age of 25. The common denominator among them is their refusal to accept an undefined, open-ended national service. This, more than any other single factor, is propelling the exodus.

The UNHCR has registered more than 300,000 Eritreans as refugees over the past decade, and many more have passed through Ethiopia and Sudan without being counted. The UNHCR representative in Sudan, Kai Lielsen, told me last year that he thought seventy to eighty percent of those who crossed into Sudan didn’t register and didn’t stay. Thus, a conservative estimate would put the total close to a million. For a country of only four to five million people, this is remarkable. And it is the combination of their vulnerability and their desperation that makes them easy marks.

The Trafficking

For years, the main refugee route ran through the Sahara to Libya and thence to Europe. When that was blocked by a pact between Libya and Italy in 2006, it shifted east to Egypt and Israel. Smugglers from the Arab tribe of Rashaida in northeastern Sudan worked with Sinai Bedouin to facilitate the transit, charging ever-higher fees until some realized they could make far more by ransoming those who were fleeing.

The smugglers-turned-traffickers eventually demanded as much as $40,000-$50,000, forcing families to sell property, exhaust life savings and tap relatives living abroad. As the voluntary flow dried up, they paid to have refugees kidnapped from UN-run camps after identifying those from urban, mostly Christian backgrounds (those most likely to have relatives in Europe and North America).

I spoke with one survivor in Israel last year whose story was typical. Philmon, a 28-year-old computer engineer, fled Eritrea in March 2012 after getting a tip he might be arrested for public statements critical of the country’s national service. Several weeks later, he was kidnapped from Sudan’s Shagara camp, taken with a truckload of others to a Bedouin outpost in the Sinai and ordered to call relatives to raise $3,500 for his release. “The beatings started the first day to make us pay faster,” he told me.

Philmon’s sister, who lived in Eritrea, paid the ransom, but he was sold to another smuggler and ransomed again, this time for $30,000. “The first was like an appetizer. This was the main course,” he said. Over the next month, he was repeatedly beaten, often while hung by his hands from the ceiling. Convinced he could never raise the full amount, he attempted suicide. “I dreamed of grabbing a pistol and taking as many of them as possible, saving one bullet for myself.”

Early on they broke one of his wrists. During many of his forced calls home to beg for money they dripped molten plastic on his hands and back. After his family sold virtually everything they had to raise the $30,000, he was released. But his hands were so damaged he could no longer grip anything. He couldn’t walk and had to be carried into Israel. Because he was a torture victim, he was sent to a shelter in Tel Aviv for medical care. In this regard, he was one of the lucky ones.

For some 35,000 Eritreans who have come to Israel since 2006, each day is suffused with uncertainty, as an anti-immigrant backlash builds. The government calls them “infiltrators,” not refugees, and threatens them with indefinite detention or—what many fear most—deportation to Eritrea. Philmon has moved on to Sweden, where the reception was more welcoming, though there, too, a virulent anti-immigrant movement is growing.

Last year, the Sinai operation began to contract due to a confluence of factors: increased refugee awareness of the risks, the effective sealing of Israel’s border to keep them out and Egyptian efforts to suppress a simmering Sinai insurgency among Bedouin Islamists. But this didn’t stop the trafficking—it just rerouted it.

What I found in eastern Sudan last summer was that Rashaida tribesmen were paying bounties to corrupt officials and local residents to capture potential ransom victims along the Sudan-Eritrea border—and even within Eritrea and Ethiopia—and were holding them within well-defended Rashaida communities there. Such captives would not be counted by government or agency monitors and would not show up at all were it not for the testimony of escapees and relatives.

Last fall, Lampedusa survivors revealed that Libya is becoming another site for ransoming and kidnapping, illustrating that as one door closes, new opportunities arise across a region of weak states and post–Arab Uprising instability. What Sudan and Libya have in common is not the predators but the prey. And the practice is expanding as word spreads of the profits to be had, much as with the drug trade elsewhere. And it will continue to expand as long as there’s a large-scale migration of vulnerable people with access to funds and no coordinated international response to stop it.

Eritrean refugee flows today run in all directions. They’re facilitated by smugglers with regional and, in some cases, global reach. The gangs behind this engage in a range of criminal activities, within which human trafficking is just a lucrative new line of business. Some have ties to global cartels and syndicates. Some have political agendas and fund them through such enterprises. Most are heavily armed.

Under such conditions, a narrowly conceived security response could quickly spin out of control and escalate into a major counterinsurgency, as in the Sinai in Egypt. For weaker states across the Sahel, the risks of ill-thought-out action are infinitely greater.

What Needs to Happen

An effective approach to this crisis would start with education and empowerment of the target population and involve efforts to identify and protect refugees throughout their flight. A key step is the early, uncoerced determination of status according to international standards. This could be coupled with an expansion of incentives to deter onward migration, including education, training, employment and, where appropriate, integration into host communities. But none of this can work without refugee engagement in the process itself.

Then, and only then, would a security operation targeted at the smuggling and trafficking have a chance of success. But it, too, needs to be multidimensional in substance and regional in scope. Each state in this network is acting independently of the others. Sudan has arrested individuals implicated in trafficking, including one police officer, but has not cracked down on corrupt officials or gone into Rashaida communities to take down the ringleaders. Ethiopia has instituted security measures within the refugee camps on its northern border but is not working with Sudan on cross-border movement. Egypt has launched military operations in the Sinai where the torture camps are situated, but the announced aim is to break up the Islamist insurgency—the government denies trafficking is taking place. A coordinated initiative would start with a conference of affected states, and it would have to be supported by donor states and appropriate agencies (Interpol among them), not only in terms of aid but also intelligence, logistics, coordination and communication.

But if the trafficking operations are truly to be rolled up, the marginalized populations from which they arise and on which they depend need to be offered sufficient incentives to withdraw support for the criminals. This means access to resources, economic alternatives to off-the-books trading, involvement in the local political process, education for their children and more. These people need to be made stakeholders in the states where they live, which is not the case today for the Sinai Bedouin or the Sudan-based Rashaida or most of the other groups involved in trans-Sahel smuggling.

Meanwhile, to dry up this particular supply of prey, political change is needed at the source, in Eritrea. That means, at a minimum, opening up the political system and the economy, limiting (not necessarily ending) national service, releasing political prisoners, implementing the long-stalled constitution and ending controls on travel so those who do want to go abroad as migrant workers can do so without illegally crossing borders and going through illicit smuggling networks.

The most important thing the United States can do to facilitate this process is convince Ethiopia to back off the border dispute that centers on a frontier town, Badme, and accept in practice—not just rhetorically—the 2002 Border Commission ruling that went in Eritrea’s favor.

Ethiopia’s intransigence on this issue—and US inaction—has long been the Asmara regime’s most powerful argument for keeping the lid on all forms of dissent. Eritreans will simply not trust Washington—or Addis Ababa—until they see some evidence of good faith.

January 28, 2020 News

Source: The diplomat

Through Eritrea, China Quietly Makes Inroads Near the Red Sea

China is finding an eager partner in Eritrea, an autocratic state generally overlooked entirely by world powers.

By Austin Bodetti

January 25, 2020

Isaias Afweri military training ChinaIt is often forgotten that Isaias Afwerki received military training in China in the 1960’s

As Iran continues to dominate headlines across the Western world, China’s far quieter quest to influence Africa and Asia has escaped the news media’s attention of late. The many examples of this Chinese strategy include the world power’s relationship with Eritrea, a country on the Horn of Africa that rarely features in geopolitical discussions. Nonetheless, officials in Beijing intend to turn what some analysts still label “Africa’s North Korea” into a centerpiece of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s costly economic megaproject inspired by the Silk Road.

In May 2019, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh Mohammed and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Beijing to laud what Eritrean officials dubbed “a healthy and strong partnership for the benefit of their two peoples.” Just five months later, Chinese Ambassador to Eritrea Yang Zigang said in an interview with Eritrea’s state-owned media that “China has consistently supported Eritrea’s nation-building endeavors by providing Eritrea with many kinds of assistance.”

The months of diplomatic niceties between China and Eritrea preceded a much more substantive development barely noticed by Western news agencies. In early November, the China Shanghai Corporation for Foreign Economic and Technological Cooperation — known as “China SFECO Group” — began building a 134-kilometer road in coordination with ranking Eritrean officials, an initiative heralded by Yang. He has displayed a keen interest in Eritrean infrastructure, noting on the embassy webpage, “Eritrea is endowed with two great natural harbors, Massawa and Assab.”

Eritrea has long expressed its enthusiasm for the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s bid to expand its sphere of influence by investing in countries across the Global South. A representative from Eritrea’s ruling party traveled to Beijing’s Belt and Road Forum in 2017. The Eritrean Information Ministry, meanwhile, praised China’s effort in 2019, calling it a step toward “open, inclusive, and balanced regional economic cooperation” and “integration of markets.”

At first glance, a little-known one-party state with an ailing economy would seem an odd choice for Chinese investment. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has only succeeded at turning his country into a pariah state during 27 years of brutal rule, and the World Bank Group considers Eritrea “one of the least developed countries in the world.” Even so, Chinese President Xi Jinping likely sees his investment in Afwerki’s regime as an opportunity to secure an ally on the Red Sea.

Chinese tacticians have been eyeing the strategic region for some time. In early 2016, China concluded a deal with Djibouti, one of Eritrea’s neighbors on the Red Sea, to construct a military base – China’s first overseas military facility. The much-discussed Chinese outpost, which itself borders a similar American facility, became operational a year later. China has deployed soldiers throughout East Africa, even sending peacekeepers to secure Chinese-staffed oil wells in South Sudan.

Chinese-Eritrean relations appear focused on economics for the time being, but the possibility of militarization looms on the horizon. China and Eritrea cooperate in a variety of sectors, including energy and public health. The East Asian world power has a long history with its East African partner, arming Eritrea not only during its 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia but also during its second war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s. In more recent years, China has offered to mediate territorial disputes between Eritrea and Ethiopia, a sign of China’s wider ambitions.

In Africa and Eritrea in particular, China’s distinct foreign policy has given it a critical advantage over its Western rivals. Xi is more than willing to ignore Afwerki’s well-known abuses of human rights, such as conscripting tens of thousands of Eritreans and forcing them into what the United Nations terms “slave-like” labor. Though Eritrea has a population of just 6 million, only Syrian applicants for asylum outnumber Eritreans in Europe. Fifty thousand live in Germany alone.

While some Western countries have tried to engage with Eritrea in the last few years, they have faced backlash. European officials suffered significant embarrassment when The New York Times revealed that an Eritrean project funded by the European Union and facilitated by the UN relied on the labor of conscripts. Many European countries view Eritrea as a source of mass migration and a key front in their bid to stop it. Unlike China, which Afwerki has tried to court through his emphasis on Eritrea’s “strategic location,” Europe seems to have few long-term goals there.

The United States, China’s main rival in Africa, has indicated little interest in Eritrea. The State Department has admitted that “[t]ensions related to the ongoing government detention of political dissidents and others, the closure of the independent press, limits on civil liberties, and reports of human rights abuses contributed to decades of strained U.S.–Eritrean relations.”

As long as China keeps overlooking Eritrea’s dismal record on human rights, the two countries’ relationship seems likely to blossom. Despite a remarkable increase in goodwill toward the East African autocracy following Eritrea’s conclusion of a peace treaty with its longtime adversaries in Ethiopia, Afwerki has few friends in the international community. For its part, China has long stated its reluctance to interfere with or even comment on other countries’ internal affairs. That position has endeared Beijing to autocrats around the world.

For now, China only has one opponent in the race to establish a sphere of influence in Eritrea: the United Arab Emirates. The UAE operates an air base and a military port in the East African country in addition to its military base in Somalia. In a sign of China’s growing reach, however, the UAE is participating in the Belt and Road Initiative. Considering that China’s ambassador to the Middle Eastern regional power vaunted their relationship as “at its best period in history” in 2019, the prospect of a confrontation between the two countries over Eritrea seems dim.

 

Source: Villa Somalia

 HEADS OF STATE AND GOVERNMENT MEETING BETWEEN ERITREA, ETHIOPIA AND SOMALIA

 JOINT COMMUNIQUE

 The Heads of State and Government of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia met in Asmara, Eritrea on 27 January 2020.

 The three leaders held candid and extensive discussions on the situations in their respective countries, their tripartite cooperation, and developments in the Horn of Africa region.

The three leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Tripartite Agreement they signed in September 2018 and reviewed the outcomes and successes of their considerable joint efforts towards its implementation.

The three leaders adopted a Joint Plan of Action for 2020 and beyond focusing on the two main and intertwined objectives of consolidating peace, stability, and security as well as promoting economic and social development. They also agreed to bolster their joint efforts to foster effective regional cooperation.

On the security front, the three leaders formulated a comprehensive plan to combat and neutralize the common threats they face, including terrorism, arms and human trafficking and drug smuggling.

Regarding economic and social development, they agreed to prioritize the mobilization of their bountiful human and natural resources; build, modernize and interface their infrastructure and develop their production and service sectors.

They also expressed their appreciation for, and their readiness to cooperate with, their friends and partners, on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit.

 The three leaders agreed to closely consult with their brothers, Heads of State for the realization of the aspirations of their people for an effective horn of Africa cooperation.

Issued in Asmara, Eritrea on 27 January 2020

Source=https://eritreahub.org/eritrea-somalia-and-ethiopia-plan-joint-fight-against-terrorism-trafficking-and-drugs