The Doors are Open to Us: On Parliamentary Inquiries and the Plight of Europe’s Migrants

A Conversation with Tineke Strik

Guest post by Karolina S. Follis. Karolina teaches in the Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion at Lancaster University. Her research concerns the European border regime and she is the author of Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier.

Tineke Strik is a Dutch Senator for the Green Party and a member of the Dutch national delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), where she serves on the the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons and is the Chairperson of the Sub-committee on Detention. She is also assistant professor of Migration Law at the Centre for Migration Law of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In 2011-2012 she conducted the PACE inquiry into the case of the migrant boat which lost power on its way from Libya to Lampedusa. In spite of distress calls, the 72 passengers were left to die over the course of a two week drift, with only 9 survivors living to tell the story.

This interview was conducted on April 9, during the Spring Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. It is part of my ongoing research, where I ask how European organizations and civil society respond to the recent migrant boat disasters off the coasts of southern European states. Senator Strik’s work shows that the existing mechanism of Council of Europe parliamentary inquiries affords certain possibilities of intervening into the relevant European policies. Beyond that, her insights help reflect on the practices and methods of conducting parliamentary inquiries, and how they compare to academic research.

KSF: You served as the Parliamentary Assembly rapporteur on the notorious 2011 case of the boat that was left to die on the Mediterranean Sea. The result of your inquiry was the report Lives Lost in the Mediterranean: Who is Responsible? You are now completing a follow up report on this case. On behalf of the PACE Migration Committee you have also worked on other issues such as readmission agreements, the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and situation in places of detention in Greece. How do you decide which issues to take up in your parliamentary work?

TS: That’s an interesting question, how these things go. I am very interested in the news when it concerns refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe, so I follow important NGOs, the UNHCR and other human rights organizations, and when they come up regularly with certain topics then I can say to the Committee, well, we really do have to get into this situation. For instance, we went to Greece visiting the detention center in the Evros region and the fence with Turkey as part of the work we did as an ad hoc committee assessing the situation in the southern Member States of the Council of Europe. We said a few years ago already, well, there are so many people trying to reach European territory and arrive at the Southern states’ borders, that it would be good to take a look at how these different Member States of the Council of Europe deal with this issue. Maybe they could learn from each other, or they could share best practices, or maybe we can show what are the risks, and what are the risks of breaching migrants’ human rights. Therefore we went to Turkey, we went to Greece, to Malta and we now really would like to go to Spain in order to see how Spain is co-operating with Morocco, dealing with people who manage to reach Melilla and Ceuta. Because I am well aware of the risks people face on the move, I know where to focus when I follow the news. But of course it’s not only the news. When I visit these countries, I always arrange meetings with people who are working there in the field, in order to be informed quite directly on the spot by people who try to improve the policies on the ground, who meet the asylum seekers and who work in the detention centers. That gives an awful lot of information which you can’t get by other means.

KSF: What happens in the course of an international parliamentary inquiry? I am curious of your reflections on the methodology of such reports.

TS: I am quite aware that I have to use my time very effectively. Maybe I can just give a few examples of how this works. When we went to Morocco it was for a formal exchange of views and so I knew from the program that we would meet several official organizations, but also UNHCR, IOM, etc. And I had the feeling that we have to talk to them also outside of the official program, because I thought that they might have some more information than they would be able to produce in this formal exchange of views in the presence of all the authorities and officials. And that really worked out very well. So we wanted to speak to these two key organizations. But beforehand I also met with people in Germany, and there are some German churches which are very active in assisting migrants in Morocco, and I said that I would like to get in touch with them. So I managed to arrange that before I went to Morocco via contacts with people who were working in the field. So we talked with the churches, with self-organized groups of migrants and, well, we knew them because of just talking and writing and asking “do you know someone in the field? Who did you meet when you went to Morocco? Who is reliable? Who can be informative?” And this is the way it worked, actually.

KSF: You are also an academic, a legal scholar. But the interactions you describe resemble the kinds of things anthropologists and other social scientists might do while conducting field research.

TS: Yes, the snowball method! As legal scholars, we are not used to doing it in this way, but of course we also do a lot of empirical research, so you also look a lot into footnotes of reports to see who can give some more information, and so on. I use my legal expertise, I think, when analyzing the reports put out by NGOs and I think, oh yes, I must focus on this issue, or that issue. So while conducting an inquiry, I prepare also on the content. What to ask? What to find out from the people I talk to?

KSF: Do you ever encounter problems of access? Churches, NGOs must be eager to meet with you as a representative of the Parliamentary Assembly. What about the authorities?

TS: Well, Lives Lost in the Mediterranean Sea is a very good example of that of course. On the one hand, I went to Rome and the Italian officials were very prepared to cooperate with me. They showed me everything, they sent me transcripts of communication that they had with the Ministry of Defense, they gave me presentations on how rescue at sea works, they took me on board to sea, to show me really what happens when a distress signal comes in. The same goes for Malta. So when you are there, talking to the officials, I think they are quite eager to create some understanding of how they work. So that was ok. But when it comes to NATO, where I tried to get the information of who the helicopter was

KSF: Any other uncooperative actors?

TS: What I think is strange is that International Maritime Organization, who are supposed to assist Member States with complying with  maritime law , that they were not very informative. And the Member States, they were also very reluctant. Some said “we didn’t receive your letters,” other said, “they landed on the wrong desk” and in the end they said, “we did not receive distress messages,” or they said, “no, were not in the area

KSF: Right now you are completing a follow-up report where you look into the actions and reactions to the left-to-die boat case, and into European responses to migrant deaths at sea more broadly. What are your own hopes for this new report?

TS: I did not yet lose all the hope that in the end someone will come forward and say “I was in that helicopter.” Or “I was standing on the vessel looking through my binoculars at these people.” There must be somewhere some satellite information, some images that can show which vessels were there in the vicinity. But until now we have not received that information but again, I hope that now with this follow up we enlarge the chance that this information will emerge. We also come up with recommendations, we say, look, actually the problems are not solved at all. Look at the catastrophes that we saw in October near Lampedusa, look at pushbacks in Greece. So we come up with recommendations to the EU, to the European Parliament, to the Member States. And Member States really must work on a common solution. We just heard again that Italy again has rescued thousands of migrants. At a certain moment this might also stop, if other Member States do not also step in and show support and solidarity. So I hope that this will contribute to the continuation of the debate and the awareness that a solution has to be found.

KSF: And that is a good note on which to finish, thank you very much for this conversation.

 

For more on this topic, see Karolina's post The Politics of Life at Sea: A Note on Sources and Alessandro Spena's The Injustice of Criminalizing Irregular Immigration.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

Follis KS (2014) The Doors are Open to Us: On Parliamentary Inquiries and the Plight of Europe’s Migrants. Available at: http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/doors-are-open-to-us/ (accessed [date]).