(CNN) Austria has passed controversial new laws restricting the right of asylum that would allow authorities to turn away most migrants at the border if a state of emergency is invoked.
The laws, among the toughest European responses to the migrant crisis, come as the country prepares to build further fences along its borders, and amid public anger over a shocking child rape case involving an Iraqi migrant.
The legislation, passed Wednesday, allows Austria’s government to declare a state of emergency over migration if it deems the country lacks the capacity to receive, house and integrate the number of people who want to enter, said Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck.
He said it would give authorities sweeping powers to block migrants from entering if they deem the country from which they are directly entering — not their homeland — is safe.
War forced half of all Syrians from their home — here’s where they went
Amnesty: New laws breach international obligations
Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said the laws were “a glaring attempt to keep people out of Austria and its asylum system.”
The measures would breach its obligations under international law by preventing access to protection for thousands of refugees, Amnesty said.
Addressing Austria’s Parliament on Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies.”
“Such policies and measures negatively affect the obligations of member states under international humanitarian law and European law,” he said.
“I welcome the open discussions in Europe — including in Austria — on integration. But I am alarmed again about growing xenophobia here and beyond. All of Europe’s leaders should live up to the principles that have guided this continent.”
But Grundboeck, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said Austria’s measures were necessary as vast numbers of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa continue to make their way along the so-called Balkan route through southeastern European countries to prosperous “destination countries” in the north.
“What we cannot accept is that migrants just transit through countries without being registered and accommodated,” he said.
Austria has been primarily a transit point into Germany, the main destination country for migrants.
But it also received more than 88,000 asylum applications last year, he said.
View this interactive content on CNN.com
New border fences proposed
The laws were passed as Austrian authorities announced they were making preparations to be able to erect a 370-meter (404-yard) fence at the Brenner Pass on the border with Italy as well as fences at two border crossings to Hungary.
Grundboeck said the preparations were in place so that authorities would be able to erect the fences if migrant flows required it.
A fence was recently erected along the Spielfeld border crossing between Austria and Slovenia, he said.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi condemned the news of the potential closure of the Brenner Pass, saying that “the possibility of closing the Brenner is blatantly against the European rules, as well as against history, against logic and against the future.”
Europe’s migration crisis in 25 photos
A woman cries after being rescued in the Mediterranean Sea about 15 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, on July 25, 2017. More than 6,600 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea in January 2018, according to the UN migration agency, and more than 240 people died on the Mediterranean Sea during that month.
Refugees and migrants get off a fishing boat at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey in October 2015.
Migrants step over dead bodies while being rescued in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Libya in October 2016. Agence France-Presse photographer Aris Messinis was on a Spanish rescue boat that encountered several crowded migrant boats. Messinis said the rescuers counted 29 dead bodies — 10 men and 19 women, all between 20 and 30 years old. “I’ve (seen) in my career a lot of death,” he said. “I cover war zones, conflict and everything. I see a lot of death and suffering, but this is something different. Completely different.”
Authorities stand near the body of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi on the shore of Bodrum, Turkey, in September 2015. Alan, his brother and their mother drowned while fleeing Syria. This photo was shared around the world, often with a Turkish hashtag that means “Flotsam of Humanity.”
Migrants board a train at Keleti station in Budapest, Hungary, after the station was reopened in September 2015.
Children cry as migrants in Greece try to break through a police cordon to cross into Macedonia in August 2015. Thousands of migrants — most of them fleeing Syria’s bitter conflict — were stranded in a no-man’s land on the border.
The Kusadasi Ilgun, a sunken 20-foot boat, lies in waters off the Greek island of Samos in November 2016.
Migrants bathe outside near a makeshift shelter in an abandoned warehouse in Subotica, Serbia, in January 2017.
A police officer in Calais, France, tries to prevent migrants from heading for the Channel Tunnel to England in June 2015.
A migrant walks past a burning shack in the southern part of the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais, France, in March 2016. Part of the camp was being demolished — and the inhabitants relocated — in response to unsanitary conditions at the site.
Migrants stumble as they cross a river north of Idomeni, Greece, attempting to reach Macedonia on a route that would bypass the border-control fence in March 2016.
In September 2015, an excavator dumps life vests that were previously used by migrants on the Greek island of Lesbos.
The Turkish coast guard helps refugees near Aydin, Turkey, after their boat toppled en route to Greece in January 2016.
A woman sits with children around a fire at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni in March 2016.
A column of migrants moves along a path between farm fields in Rigonce, Slovenia, in October 2015.
A ship crowded with migrants flips onto its side in May 2016 as an Italian navy ship approaches off the coast of Libya. Passengers had rushed to the port side, a shift in weight that proved too much. Five people died and more than 500 were rescued.
Refugees break through a barbed-wire fence on the Greece-Macedonia border in February 2016, as tensions boiled over regarding new travel restrictions into Europe.
Policemen try to disperse hundreds of migrants by spraying them with fire extinguishers during a registration procedure in Kos, Greece, in August 2015.
A member of the humanitarian organization Sea-Watch holds a migrant baby who drowned following the capsizing of a boat off Libya in May 2016.
A migrant in Gevgelija, Macedonia, tries to sneak onto a train bound for Serbia in August 2015.
Migrants, most of them from Eritrea, jump into the Mediterranean from a crowded wooden boat during a rescue operation about 13 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, in August 2016.
Refugees rescued off the Libyan coast get their first sight of Sardinia as they sail in the Mediterranean Sea toward Cagliari, Italy, in September 2015.
Local residents and rescue workers help migrants from the sea after a boat carrying them sank off the island of Rhodes, Greece, in April 2015.
Investigators in Burgenland, Austria, inspect an abandoned truck that contained the bodies of refugees who died of suffocation in August 2015. The 71 victims — most likely fleeing war-ravaged Syria — were 60 men, eight women and three children.
Horrifying rape case
The moves in Austria comes days after the far-right Freedom Party won the first round of the country’s presidential elections, and as the trial of an Iraqi asylum seeker accused of raping a child played out this week in a court in Vienna.
The defendant, 20, has been charged in the rape of a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in December.
He admitted the attack in court Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the criminal court in Vienna told CNN.
She said the case had been postponed as the court awaited a report on the victim from a child psychologist. If the victim is found to be suffering serious psychological consequences, the sentence could be increased from a potential 10 years to 15 years, she said.
The man told police he had committed the attack due to a “sexual emergency” as he had not seen his wife in four months, prosecutors said.
Initial stance was more welcoming
The case has contributed to hardening attitudes toward migrants in Austria, which initially responded to the migrant crisis with a more welcoming stance.
It follows a spate of sex attacks blamed on migrants across European cities on New Year’s Eve, including hundreds of reported assaults of women by a mob of migrants in Cologne, Germany, and sexual assaults of women in Salzburg, Austria.
View this interactive content on CNN.com
Earlier this month, the first migrants were deported from Europe to Turkey as part of a controversial new deal between the European Union and Ankara to tackle the migration crisis.
The plan was agreed upon last month as Europe struggles to respond to the largest migration crisis since World War II. More than 1 million people made “irregular arrivals” inside Europe’s borders in 2015 alone, many of them displaced by the Syrian civil war.
Greece sends first migrants back to Turkey under new deal
CNN’s Lindsay Isaac and Claudia Otto contributed to this report.
Source link : https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/04/28/europe/austria-tough-migrant-laws
Author :
Publish date : 2016-04-28 07:00:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.