05/12/2019
Appalling stories are ongoing (voir http://www.gettingthevoiceout.org). Today we learnt that the authorities of the Foreigners Office want to deport Mr. A at all costs. Mr. A is from Somalia. He already went through inhuman and degrading treatments from police officers escorting him previously. Let’s remind though that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatments are forbidden by Article 5 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the same way as torture. The European Court of Human Rights reminds that there is no exception to that prohibition. Besides, every State shall forbid (…) acts constituting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatments that are not acts of ‘torture’ when such acts are being perpetrated by a civil servant or any other person.
Therefore it should be the State responsible to pursue the wrongdoers from the police, and a complaint of the victims, such as the one that was lodged, should not even be necessary. Here it is the opposite, everything must be repressed, both literally and figuratively. Is it out of fear of what would be discovered during the instruction, just as it happened with Mrs T recently, that the Foreigners Office is in such a hurry to repeat this man’s plight?
Under the leadership of Maggie De Block, the Foreigners Office once again seems allowed to act at its discretion in violation of humanity and all the rules.
We read in the media, probably as an attempt to reassure us, that civil servants of the AIG were on board. This general inspection of the police is under the direct leadership of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs, and from the latter spring the undignified migration policies we know in Belgium. Have they ensured that everything was done according to the rules, like for Semira? or, as said regarding the treatment inflicted to MrsT, the use of force was necessary because madam was too ‘strong’? Were they only present to warrant anything that would have happened next?
We thank all the persons who opposed this ignominy and encourage each witness of such acts to do the same even though the criminalisation of solidarity might imply that you are in turn also violently expelled from the plane, as had also been the “6 heroes”.
Expulsions are always violent because they are part of a racist system that isolates and criminalises migrants. The so-called use of force in a situation of deportation is itself disproportionate, therefore it is high time to consider all these practices as illegal and to denounce this logic consisting in sorting human beings.
FREE MOVEMENT FOR ALL
STOP TO DEPORTATIONS AND NO TO CLOSED CENTRES
