Tuesday, March 02, 2004

refugees - EU-countries develop a new issue

The Dutch government is speeding up the eviction of refugees who did not get an official status and develops itself into a guinea pig for new EU-China policies. I got in a week time already a couple of requests about Chinese who have to return and bump into a bureaucratic wall.
What happened until recently was that illegal Chinese could not return to China, because China would not acknowledge them as a citizen. Mostly they would remain as illegals.
A few weeks ago the so-called Schengen-countries (the part of the EU without borders) have signed an agreement with China to allow Chinese tourists in. Other EU-countries will be following fast. That decision was forced upon them by Germany who last year already decided in a bilateral treaty to allow Chinese tourists in, although that was going against the arrangements in the Schengen treaty.
Part of that agreement was also the commitment of China to take back its illegal citizens. The details of that agreement are not yet very clear and seems to run into problems already. The Dutch government has for domestic political reasons decided to speed up the eviction of refugees and is testing now the Chinese willingness to take back citizens without a legal status.
The Chinese embassy demands a birth certificate before it takes people back, they do not have that, they cannot get that very easy, so that seems an interesting stale mate. The victims are of course the refugees.
Unclear is what the arrangement now is, whether assistance is available for returning refugees, even whether refugees will return. In any case: European countries have developed themselves a problem.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home