Invasion of Europe continues….
The European Union has a long-standing policy that asylum-seekers must be processed in the first country in which they arrive (and governments can send those back which go ‘asylum shopping’ and sneak into other countries), however, here the European Court of Human Rights basically throws the policy out the window.
Looks like it opens the door for an asylum-shopping spree.
Switzerland already has other large costly migrant families they would surely like to send back.
From the Times of Malta:
The Advice on Individual Rights in Europe, European Council on Refugees and Exiles and Amnesty International today welcomed a European Court of Human Rights’ judgement preventing the return of an asylum seeking family to Italy after making their way to Switzerland.
The organisations had intervened jointly with the assistance of lawyers from across Europe in the case of the Tarakhel family v Switzerland.
The Tarakhel family, an Afghan family with young children, made their way to Switzerland from Italy and claimed asylum there. The European Court of Human Rights held that returning the family to Italy without guarantees that they would benefit from appropriate conditions would violate human rights as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Court ruled that returning the family to Italy would breach the European Convention on Human Rights which prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment, if this were done without Switzerland having first obtained specific individual guarantees that the Italian authorities would take charge of the applicants in a manner adapted to the age of the children and that the family would be kept together.
The ECHR reiterated that before returning people under the Dublin Regulation, States had to obtain individual guarantees that the fundamental rights of asylum seekers would be respected. The Court ruled that safety in another European member state could not be assumed.
Looks like it throws out the whole Dublin Regulation to me. But, of course the countries on the borders of Europe—Italy, Malta, Greece and Bulgaria—all must be cheering: let’s just move them all on to another country!
See our complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive here.