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The EU’s “Let Them Drown” policy
HANA NABIZADA | CONTENT WRITER
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Europe’s increasing hostility towards migrants seeking asylum has reached an alltime high, with their policies exacerbating the already deathly crossing migrants make across the Mediterranean Sea. This issue was brought to the attention of the world’s media once with the death of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi in 2015, but it has since slipped down the news agenda once again. According to the Missing Migrants Project, nearly 25,000 migrants have gone missing or dead in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014. The biggest cause of death? Drowning. The European Union and many European countries have abandoned policies that have led to more dangerous crossings, specifically abandoning search and rescue services.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, there are no EU ships patrolling areas where many boats enter distress and aerial surveillance is conducted not for the purposes of rescue, but interceptions and returns. The EU has gone as far as supporting Libyan forces in intercepting boats through the use of aerial surveillance and drones deployed by Frontex (the EU border agency), resulting in thousands of migrants being sent back to Libya where they ultimately face abuse, torture, and exploitation. Women, almost overnight, had suddenly lost control of their bodily autonomy and reproductive health after five Supreme Court justices (four of whom were men) voted that there is no constitutional right to abortion access in the United States.
Refusal to comply with these new rulings varies by state, with Texas and other Southern states having some of the harshest penalties, including up to life in prison. Because these laws and rules restrict women’s freedoms. As aforementioned, women in the US also suffer from repressive governmental control of their bodies which is something that Iranian women can also relate to.
Any state interference in a woman’s personal life has no place in modern society, and regardless of nationality, women must advocate for transnational feminism to liberate women from patriarchal practices which govern, oppress and exploit women globally.
The failure of the EU and European countries in keeping their promises and international
commitments made to aid and rescue migrants only allows for human rights abuses against them to be made easier. Agreements such as the Global Compact for Migrants, albeit nonlegally binding and five EU countries having not signed it, are not being upheld. It is very clear that EU countries are not attempting to adequately “save lives and establish coordinated international efforts on missing migrants”, the eighth objective of the GCM.
The EU seems to be following a very similar approach to the UK made in 2014, in which the UK announced they would no longer be supporting search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea. This unpopular policy was then dubbed the “let them drown” policy by British media, and rightly so. It only makes one wonder how many more Alan Kurdi’s must be allowed to happen before the EU and the rest of the world realise the horrors of their policies. Inevitably, many women could also lose their lives as a result of illegal abortions which follow abortion bans due to doctors not wanting to risk their careers by performing them. Some Western commentators have framed this as an issue of religion or “backwards Middle Eastern culture” which Iranians need to be “saved from”, but this is a misleading narrative. The real issue here is a pattern which can be seen globally. The Iranian government must remove the laws which led to Mahsa Amini’s death and must remove their repressive morality police from operation, but why?
Source: REUTERS, refugees and migrants awaiting rescue in the Mediterranean Sea
