When it comes to disregarding human rights and international legal obligations, Guantanamo is easily matched by the 400 migrant detention centres across Europe.One of the reasons why President Obama’s mandate has fallen many miles short of expectations is his clear lack of will — let’s dispense with euphemisms — to deliver his promise to close…
Crocodile Tears In the space of just over a week the world watched in astonishment as two ships sank off the Italian coast, giving rise to staggering death-tolls (359 on the 3rd of October, more than 50 on the 11th) and various expressions of grief. Among the mourners were those directly responsible for asylum and…
Democracy means dissent, distrust and resistance According to classical theory, the roots of democracy are in consensus. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Experience has shown us that the key to democracy lays elsewhere; in the capacity to accept and even guarantee dissent and criticism of the established powers, with resistance to these powers…
Faced with the difficulty of explaining how the image of immigrants has been constructed by the migratory policies in the majority of receiving countries (as certainly is the case in the USA and the EU), many of us have turned on more than one occasion to the metaphor borne of UIysses’ strategy against Polifema in…