Greece freezes asylum claims over migrant ‘invasion' from Libya
Greece on Friday enforced a three-month freeze on asylum claims from migrants arriving by boat from North Africa, to stem a surge from Libya that the government has called an 'invasion'.
The emergency legislation, approved by a majority of 177 out of 293 lawmakers, allows authorities to detain asylum seekers in camps for up to 18 months.
Support for the bill mainly came from the conservative government's MPs and far-right lawmakers.
'We have made the difficult but absolutely necessary decision to temporarily suspend the examination process of asylum applications for those arriving by sea from North African countries,' Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement to German tabloid Bild on Friday.
'This decision sends a clear message, leaving no room for misinterpretation, to human trafficking networks: Greece is not an open transit route. The journey is dangerous, the outcome uncertain, and the money paid to smugglers ultimately wasted,' he said.
ALSO READ: Greek mother given two more life sentences for killing her children
Greece's migration ministry says over 14 000 migrants have reached the country this year, including over 2 000 in recent days from Libya.
The influx has mainly hit Crete — Mitsotakis's home island and one of Greece's top travel destinations — sparking anger among local authorities and tourism operators.
'Any migrants entering illegally will be arrested and detained,' the prime minister told parliament this week.
'Greece cannot have boats totalling 1 000 people a day,' Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told Skai TV, adding that the country will undertake a 'draconian revision' of how it deals with migrants.
'The Greek ministry for migration is not a hotel — nobody can enter illegally, ask for asylum and receive benefits, three meals a day and shelter — all that at the expense of Greek and European taxpayers,' Plevris said.
ALSO READ: Chaos erupts at protest for Greece rail disaster victims
Some 8 000 people have landed in Crete since the beginning of the year, according to the migration ministry.
Plevris — formerly a member of the far-right LAOS party and now part of Mitsotakis's New Democracy party — has called the recent influx an 'invasion from North Africa'.
On Friday he told parliament that out of a group of over 500 people who recently reached Crete, the vast majority are young Egyptian men not entitled to asylum.
The move has been criticised by rights groups as a violation of international and EU law, and opposition parties have called it unconstitutional.
Zoe Konstantopoulou, a former head of parliament and current head of the radical left Course of Freedom party, called it a racist and inhuman 'stigma' on Greek democracy.
ALSO READ: Thousands leave as fresh tremors shake Greece's Santorini
Noting an 'exceptional' situation, European Commission migration spokesperson Markus Lammert said on Thursday: 'We are in close contact with the Greek authorities to obtain necessary information on these measures.'
Greece took similar steps in 2020 during a migration surge at its land border with Turkey.
To manage the influx, the government could reopen camps built after the 2015 migration crisis, government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said this week.
Mitsotakis also told parliament that it would build up to two additional camps on Crete.
– By: © Agence France-Presse
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IOL News
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'Very insufficient' aid entering Gaza, Germany says, as two million face starvation
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Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Daily Maverick
From Epstein to empire: The historical continuity of men buying and selling the bodies of women and young girls
I have kept one eye on the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell story, and another on research for the book on which I am working. There's a link between the two stories. It is the continuity of men trading, buying and selling the bodies of women and young girls, and, as I came to learn, 'managing' prostitution to protect European colonialists and settlers (white men) from diseased 'natives' in the tropics. I should make a couple of things clear. Whatever is written below is taken from either official records and/or the research and the writing of British colonialists and settlers. Because of space constraints, I don't list all the references and use quotation marks only to draw attention to some of the absurdities of colonial policies, statements and expressed ideals. So, as the Russians would say, Doveryay, no proveryay (Trust, but verify). The set of chapters I am currently working on is about the societies that British colonisers and subsequent settlers created. It's not about South Africa, although I did drop in a short reference to the creation of gardens across the British Empire and the way they are being maintained by post-colonial governments. The chapters look at prostitution, the trafficking of women and the creation of brothels in the colonies, and how the British colonists 'managed' the sexual relations between their bureaucrats and settlers. More below. The faces of evil Let's get the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell stuff out of the way, but keep in the frame the way that the bodies of women and young girls have historically been treated as 'things' that can be traded and used to satisfy sexual pleasures and perversions. Or, as British and US records show, to satisfy the lustful urges of invaders, settlers and soldiers. My colleague Marianne Thamm has written about the Epstein story. I won't go into the sordid details. What I will say, to illustrate further a continuity of cruelty, is that the late Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, the late Robert Maxwell (as venal, vile and corrupt a man as there has been) represent the face of evil. (Unless evil does not quite capture paedophilia, the trafficking of young girls, stealing money from his [Maxwell's] company's pension fund, and leaving people who had been paying into the fund penniless.) He, Robert Maxwell, was ' up there with Bernie Madoff,' said Roy Greenslade, author of 'Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire'. Maxwell was described as evil (see John Preston's book, 'Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron') and admitted that during the Second World War, he shot a group of German soldiers despite their displaying a white flag, and (much) later remarked to one of his sons, 'I once killed boys your age. I regret it deeply'. He would be considered a war hero by the British. The continuity referred to three paragraphs above has come a long way, I would suggest. Satisfying the lusts of colonists, invaders and conquerors Let me work backwards. Though the following are not the main focus of my current work, I should start with a passage from The New York Times: 'When Cho Soon-ok was 17 in 1977, three men kidnapped and sold her to a pimp in Dongducheon, a town north of Seoul. She was about to begin high school, but instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a ballerina, she was forced to spend the next five years under the constant watch of her pimp, going to a nearby club for sex work. Her customers: American soldiers.' In the prologue of ' Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in US/Korea Relations ', Katherine Moon wrote: 'The selling and buying of sex by Koreans and Americans have been a staple of US-Korean relations since the Korean War (1950-53) and the permanent stationing of US troops in Korea since 1955. It is not simply a matter of women walking the streets and picking up US soldiers for a few bucks. It is a system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the US military). The US military and the Korean government have referred to such women as 'bar girls,' 'hostesses,' 'special entertainers,' 'businesswomen,' and 'comfort women.' Koreans have also called these women the highly derogatory names, yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess).' In ' Pulp Vietnam, War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines ', Gregory Daddis echoed this abuse of women, and referred to 'sexual conquest of Oriental women' as a means to prove the virility of US soldiers and demonstrate power and dominance over 'savages' (see the chapter on 'War Heroes and Sexual Conquerors'). See also ' Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America' by Ji-Yeon Yuh. Women's bodies as a colonial project In South and Southeast Asia (and in early European settlement of North America), women were effectively traded, and prostitutes were corralled, as it were, into brothels under the guise of 'management' to protect white men from contracting diseases that were carried by the indigenous population. (It should be pointed out that the Japanese invaders in East and Southeast Asia also created brothels. My focus is, however, mainly on European, especially British colonial and settler expansionism.) In North America, the colonists and settlers moved readily 'from the raping of a woman to the raping of a country to the raping of the world. Acts of aggression, of hate, of conquest, or empire-building [evolve to] harems of women and harems of people; houses of prostitution and houses of pimps.' (Jack Forbes, 'Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism', p 8). In South and Southeast Asia, the sanitised basis for (venereal) disease control became a matter 'central to the state', enabled by the Contagious Diseases Act (in India) in 1886, where it was deemed necessary to provide soldiers and settlers with 'attractive' women, and make sure that everyone adhered to hygiene practices. The overriding policy in parts of the European empire in the east (and subsequent settlers) was as much about domination and control, as it was to get prostitutes 'off the streets and into brothels' to better manage women's bodies, and make sure 'natives' were 'safe' for satisfying the lusts and libidos of 'white' men. 'Surrounded by garbage, domestic animals, crawling children, and the stench of human excretion, the whole area was a scene of filth, pollution and vice. Superimposed on this was the fear of the 'native' as a rebel. The 'native' prostitute was thus by her very origin perceived as an amalgamation of all three — filth, disease and crime.' (See 'The Indian Prostitute as Colonial Subject: Bengal 1864 – 1883', by Ratnabali Chatterjee). 'The Victorian age,' wrote Chatterjee in Prostituted Women and the British Empire, 'provided a paradigm of sexual and moral hypocrisy.' Beyond Asia, the British were more concerned with the preservation and protection of whiteness than they were with 'natives'. The rise of eugenics, with attendant notions of 'racial purity', introduced a whole new raft of concerns about whether 'native' or 'white' prostitutes ought to be traded. The examples I found in these cases were from the British colonial era in Nigeria. That was when 'all sexual activities of white women in the colonies were an important part of empire building and the maintenance of white prestige,' wrote Linda Bryder in 'Sex, Race, and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review' (pp 809 – 810). In Southeast Asia, Dutch colonists considered the indigenous women 'untameable'. The indigenous women, too (not unlike the modern-day women who would lure girls into networks of abuse), would 'sell' young girls to colonists and settlers. (See ' Wives, Slaves and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia ', by Eric Jones). Nonetheless, the female body was traded in European, notably British colonies, and as one historian of the era explained, 'The expansion of Europe was not only a matter of 'Christianity and commerce,' it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage.' Robert Hyam's work is not without criticism (see Carina Ray's criticism in ' Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire '), but he explained, nonetheless, that 'sexual opportunities were seized with imperious confidence', and that such opportunities were 'a perk' of imperial expansion of the British Empire across the world. He contended (further) that the sexual opportunities came with the service of empire, which freed men from 'repressive Victorian morality codes at home' and they could 'fulfil their libidinous desires with the colonies' sexually decadent 'natives''. This use and abuse, trade and 'management' of the bodies of women and young girls is continuously exposed, researched and discussed. It is a part of my current research (not academic), which focuses specifically on the societies established by the British empire-builders and subsequent settlers. With one eye on this history, the Epstein-Maxwell abomination represents, to me at least, a continuity of the history of the way the bodies of women and girls have been bought and sold — very often to satisfy the libidos of men. It goes much deeper than mere misogyny and has to do with deeply embedded (cultures and habits) of assuming that women are things that can be played with, fondled and exploited for sexual pleasure. Or, as Stephanie Pappas wrote in Scientific American, 'Our brains see men as whole and women as parts … sexualised body parts.' DM
TimesLIVE
3 days ago
- TimesLIVE
Zelensky, moving to defuse crisis, restores power of anti-graft agencies
President Volodymyr Zelensky restored the independence of Ukraine's two main anti-corruption agencies on Thursday, moving to defuse a political crisis that has shaken faith in his wartime leadership and worried Western partners. Thousands of protesters rallied in Kyiv and other cities in recent days in a rare show of discontent after MPs led by Zelensky's ruling party rushed through amendments last week defanging the respected agencies. Zelensky reversed course after the outcry, under pressure from top European officials who warned that Ukraine was jeopardising its bid for EU membership by curbing the powers of its anti-graft authorities. He signed a new bill on Thursday shortly after MPs approved it 331 to 0, saying the legislation 'guarantees the absence of any kind of outside influence [or] interference'. 'Ukraine is a democracy — there are definitely no doubts,' Zelensky said on the Telegram messaging app. Thursday's law reverses amendments that had given his hand-picked general prosecutor the power to transfer cases away from the agencies and reassign prosecutors, a step critics alleged had been designed to protect his allies from prosecution.
