Between 1991 and 1993, I attempted three times to escape from the United States. The Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium all coerced my return to these shores. "Hard Realities" on my web site presents an acccount of these experiences.
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. A tourist is mugged in the park -- knocked down, glasses broken, watch and camera stolen. The police stand by and do nothing. When he goes to the station house to make a complaint, the desk sergeant says "Don't be silly. That's a very safe park. The police there are very efficient and conscientious. You must be crazy. Get out of here!" That is precisely the simplistic sophistry encountered by many asylum-seekers in European states if they came from, or passed through, a country regarded as "safe." Their claims are presumed to be "manifestly unfounded." They are forced to leave their chosen country of asylum, often returned involuntarily to the country through which they have traveled or from which they have fled. It happened to me, three times, before the "safe country" doctrines even became official policy. Ms. Judith Coelewij-Kolk of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Department calls that nation's asylum policies "humane and justified." They are not, nor are, in my experience, the policies of Denmark and Belgium. Common sense and documented human experience indicate that no country is safe for everyone, all the time. Persons in every land have been denied the equal protection of the law, deprived of due process, victimized by corruption, subjected to irremediable persecution. A history of persecution, group or individual, validates a fear of persecution. Such persons are refugees, as defined in international law and in the laws of European nations. Objective investigation of the facts may well confirm their claims, yet they face in Europe a knee-jerk judgment of "manifestly unfounded" and the degrading horror of forced repatriation. Article 3 of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees forbids discrimination as to race, religion, or country of origin. Article 33 forbids the return "refoulement" of a refugee "in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." Articles 2 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights likewise forbid discrimination on the basis of national or social origin. Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment forbids the return of a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. In its Resolution on the Asylum Policy of Certain Member States, dated 19 June, 1987, the European Parliament decried "the flagrant violations of human rights and international law perpetrated by border officials who, in particular at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, and London airports, are forcibly returning ever increasing numbers of asylum-seekers to the countries through which they have passed previously or even those countries from which they have had to flee," and called upon Member States to desist from such practices. Amnesty International likewise speaks out in strong opposition to the forced repatriation of asylum-seekers. European countries nevertheless persist in discriminating against, and forcibly repatriating, asylum-seekers from countries they arbitrarily consider "safe." Until recently, the Dutch-based organization United had on its web site a list of more than two thousand individuals who have died since 1993 trying to obtain political asylum in "Fortress Europe." Most of these are persons -- men, women, and children -- who tried to reach Europe and died along the way. The saddest cases of all, though, are those caught up in the asylum procedures of European States who were murdered by racists, committed suicide in utter despair, died during deportation, or were killed in their own countries after coerced repatriation. For these, the asylum process itself must take grim responsibility. The case that I can't forget is this one: "June 94, 1, N.N., Macedonia, tortured to death in Macedonia after his expulsion from the Netherlands, AD/MNS" Had sick criminals not obstructed processing of my 1991 complaint against Denmark and the Netherlands before the UN Committee Against Torture, that man and others might still be alive. I nearly made the list myself. In 1993, the Belgian authorities threw me into prison for three weeks in order to coerce me into returning to the USA. A couple of days after my "voluntary" repatriation, I tried to kill myself. Such discrimination is unjustifiable. Asylum cases must be judged compassionately on their own merits. An act or policy cannot be a flagrant human rights violation in one decade and perfectly all right in the next. This is illogical. Therefore, as a victim subjected without recourse to the absurdity of "safe country" assumptions and the horror of forced repatriation, condemned in 1987 by the European Parliament itself, I call upon Europe to abandon such practices and to compensate all those so abused, including myself, for this deplorable treatment. Invite those of us who have survived back to your shores to live in liberty and security. If you cannot take us in, help us find a free country that will. Common decency and law both dictate that you try to help people who are fleeing persecution, not concoct specious excuses for throwing us away like garbage.
The UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee Agaist Torture will not address this issue. My complaints agaist Denmark and the Netherlands have remained unacknowledged and unprocessed for many years. The coverup is grievous and intractable.If nations will not fulfill their human rights commitments -- refuse to keep the promises they make to the rest of humankind -- they surrender their honor and undermine the very Rule of Law, without which civilization will surely collapse in a heap of lies and arrogant evasions. The time for honor, decency, and due process is now.
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