Page - 205 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 205 Pushed back to nature The “push back” operations consists of maneuvers where boats with migrants are forced back, either to their port of origin, to another destination outside the EU or just to remote areas of the sea. These actions have been criticized for (among other reasons) blocking asylum-seekers from claiming protection, thus violating both international and EU asylum law, like the prohibition of refoulement.4 The customary principle of non-refoulement is meant to protect the right of every person seeking asylum against being “rejected, returned, or expelled in any manner wha- tever where this would compel him or her to remain in or to return to a territory where he or she may face a threat of persecution or to life, physical integrity, or liberty” (Lauterpacht and Bethlehem 2003, 150, my emphasis). The terms of the threat against which the international treatises protect are thus described as if proceeding exclusively from either a state or a de facto political force, therefore meaning persecution from a concrete agent. The convention for the protection of refugees does not address the eventuality that travellers are just abandoned to their fate out in the open.5 There is no specification about the action of expelling refugees into zones of exposure to environmental dangers or to physiological collapse. Therefore, there seems to be neither an adequate legal nor a theoretical framework for this action of being pushed back “into nature.” Push back maneuvers force travellers to keep navigating without being able to reach the coast. They are part of what Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber call “government strategies of non-arrival” that, “supported by sophisticated technologies of detection, force illegalized travellers into ever more clandestine modes of travel and ever more convoluted routes, which increase the duration and dangers of their ordeals” (Weber & Pickering 2011, 27). Dissuasive measures, they explain, do not deter potential immigrants from trying to cross the border: They are not only ineffective, but also highly lethal. Most migrants or refugees won’t be dissuaded; they rather risk undertaking the travel in more precarious conditions and through riskier ways. When border areas are the objects of more intensified surveillance, migrants and their networks of “facilitators” look for alternative routes, which are usually more dangerous and longer. And boats are forced to stay on the water for a longer time. A captain of the Sea Protection Direc- torate of the hellenic coast Guard I interviewed in September 2013 seemed proud of the fact that more and more illegalized travellers were being dissuaded from entering Europe via Greece and were looking for alternative routes, sailing from Turkey directly to Italy. The demand does not recede and traffickers do not give up but adapt to the changing circumstances with new methods. The last one, as reported in the press in the first few days of 2015, is the use of much bigger ships that are just abandoned to their fate in Italian waters. In Europe, most border related deaths are related precisely to the increased exposure to the 4 The European court of human Rights ruled against this practice in the case Hirsi et al. v Italy, having found that the passengers of a boat diverted by the Italian coast guard back to Libya in 2009 were exposed to the risk of being subjected to ill-treatment there (see Moreno-Lax 2012). The applicants in Hirsi were eleven Somali natio- nals and thirteen Eritrean nationals who had been part of a group of about two hundred individuals trying to reach Italy aboard three vessels crossing the Mediterranean from Libya. On 6 May 2009, as they were within the Maltese Search and Rescue Region of responsibility, they were intercepted by the Italian police and coastguard, transferred onto Italian military ships and, ten hours later, handed over to the Libyan authorities in the Port of Tripoli. 5 The text of the convention and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) is available in <http://www. unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html> [accessed 2015-01-28]