Posts Tagged ‘asylum’
Residency rights and deportations - good news for some?
Having given the Minister for Justice a qualified welcome at the start of his term, the time has come to begin scrutinising the work of his Department on immigration and integration. Having abolished the office of the Minister for Integration and replaced it with an understaffed section called the office for the promotion of migrant integration, Minister Shatter has vowed to speed up citizenship applications – very good news, and introduce citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies, less good news, but for some migrants a positive step all the same. And, last week his department granted residency to 850 non-EU parents of Irish citizen children, though only after the European Court of Justice ruled last March that the non-EU parents of EU citizens must be allowed to live and work in that EU state. Read the rest of this entry »
Human rights, migrants and anti-racism
On September 9 the European parliament passed a resolution calling on Paris to ‘immediately suspend all expulsions of Roma’, saying the policy ‘amounted to discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity’. French Gendarmes were accused of compiling secret illegal lists of Roma and other travelling minorities in violation of French laws on ethnic profiling. In 2010 France deported 5,000 Romanians and Bulgarians (10,000 in 2009), and vows to continue deporting Roma, all EU citizens, even though the expulsions are against the constitution and break international human rights laws on discrimination and despite the European Commission’s announcement on 1 October that it would initiate legal action against France. Indeed France began fingerprinting departing Roma to prevent their return, proving the futility of invoking human rights law (Crumley, 2010). Read the rest of this entry »
Asylum seekers are not ‘things’
In July 2010 the government of the Republic of Ireland began a review of its policies of dispersal and direct provision for asylum seekers. This may sound positive particularly in light of the criticism by the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC) in 2003, that the direct provision scheme is ‘gravely detrimental of the human rights of a group of people legally present in the country and to whom the government has moral and legal obligations under national and international law’, and recommendation that the scheme be ‘abandoned immediately’. Read the rest of this entry »
So what if she forged?
Pamela Izevbekhai with her children
I am writing this before the case has been decided and before we know whether a Nigerian mother who is seeking asylum in Ireland for herself and her daughters is allowed to remain in Ireland.
Much has been said about Pamela Izevbekhai’s case. Her recent admission, on the Marion Finnucane show, that her asylum claim was based on forged documents provided a dramatic turning point not only in her own case, but in the whole complex relations between the Irish state and African, particularly Nigerian, asylum seekers.
Equality aftermath
In the aftermath of the resignation of Niall Crowley, Chief Executive of the Equality Authority, the Minister for Justice made ‘no apologies’ for cutting the Equality Authority’s budget, privileging instead police spending. This is in line with seeing equality work as defending Irish society’s problematic marginal populations, rather than maintaining equality for all, which was what the EA was about.
Denying racism and declaring itself post- and anti-racist, Ireland, like other EU member states, in restricting immigration, limiting it to those migrants who are useful to ‘our way of life’, and castigating Travellers and poor people for not playing their part, particularly now that the economic boom is over.