“Most of our workers have a foreign background themselves, so I think we all feel this a bit more.” That stance is costly. For those purposes it’s justified but when it’s being used against humans who need help, that’s awkward,” said Dikici. “We want to sell razor wire, of course, but only for the right purposes: to secure property, factories, jails, or for example on the railings of ships to prevent piracy. In an interview last year, Deger’s successor, Efekan Dikici, said that he and his staff have kept to the principle. In 2015, Talat Deger, director of the Berlin-based company Mutanox, refused to do a deal with the Hungarian government. Nevertheless, some manufacturers have refused to sell to border fences on humanitarian grounds. Moreover, it can be hard to discover exactly which portions of Europe’s fences are topped by razor wire and who supplied it in recent years many governments have classified detailed information about fences as state security issues. According to Kate Dearden, project officer at the I nternational Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, many governments only keep records on deaths at borders, rather than deaths that occur later as a result of injuries during attempts to cross them. One difficulty in mounting a challenge is the near impossibility of establishing the true scale of the injuries inflicted specifically by razor wire at borders. In light of legal constraints in several European states on the deployment of razor wire in rural areas, some manufacturers even indicate the wildlife-friendly credentials of their razor wire. In Slovenia, environmentalists’ fears of the impact of razor wire on wildlife led in 2016 to the removal of the coils from sections of its border with Croatia. Recent successful attempts at removing razor wire from Europe’s borders have not been motivated by legal or humanitarian concerns but by ecological ones. Balkan wildlife faces an “extinction threat” from razor wire. Fortified borders like these interfere with that legal right, particularly in places where it’s an open secret that 99% of asylum claims lodged with border guards are rejected,” Kasparek adds.Īn animal is killed on a fence built to keep out migrants in Slovenia. Sometimes it is very necessary to cross the border irregularly in order to lodge an asylum claim. “So there is a legal tension at the EU’s borders. On the other hand, the notion of crossing a border illegally is usually voided under international refugee law if making an asylum claim,” says Bernd Kasparek, a researcher at Border Monitoring, a German NGO that tracks pushbacks of refugees. “On the one hand, legislation about borders states that crossing anywhere other than an official checkpoint is illegal. Others even wonder about the legality of its use. Public pressure elsewhere has led some governments to reconsider the use of razor wire as experts brand it both inhumane and ineffective. So the Moroccans build an ‘ugly’ fence which can be criticised, while the Spanish create a more ‘humanitarian’ alternative,” says Kopp. Meanwhile, violent border policing is kept farther afield: out of sight, out of mind. At home, it’s about drones, surveillance and technical cooperation to identify migrants approaching the EU border before they even reach it. “The European style is to outsource this more vicious, older style of border control with its razor wire and multiple fences to third countries. These apparent double standards are part of a pattern, says Karl Kopp, of the German NGO Pro Asyl. And Grande-Marlaska announced recently that fences around the two Spanish exclaves would be raised by 30 metres to deter incomers. Spain’s humanitarian policy has become largely redundant, though, given that Moroccan authorities have started installing razor wire along their own border fence with Ceuta. And throughout 20, Spanish officials stated their determination to remove the razor wire and, in the words of the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, move beyond “bloody methods” of border control. The socialist government led by Pedro Sanchez had a chance to make good on repeated promises of a more humanitarian migration policy after June 2018. The wire was first installed in 2005, removed two years later and restored by the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy in 2013. The Spanish authorities started removing the razor wire from these fences last December as part of a review of border security. Photograph: Antonio Sempere/AFP/Getty Images A migrant climbs a fence fortified with razor wire on his way into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, north Africa, in August 2019.
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