England and Denmark have a common goal more worrying than the semi-final
Tonight’s game (7 July) promises to be an epic encounter. Gareth Southgate’s energised England is taking on Kasper Hjulmand’s Denmark – many people’s “alternative team” after brave performances following the frightening cardiac arrest suffered by Christian Eriksen on the pitch.
Both are riding a wave of mounting public hope and expectation.
While the immediate focus is football, sport is not the only way that these two countries have been drawn together. Off the pitch, both countries are busy emulating and encouraging each other with cruel plans to alienate and obstruct people seeking asylum.
Denmark and the UK (particularly the Westminster government) are shamelessly abandoning their responsibilities to people seeking asylum.
Denmark has taken the lead. Hundreds of Syrian refugees have been told by the Danish Immigration Service to return to conflict-ravaged Syria where the regime of President Assad remains as brutal as ever. His jails teem with horribly maltreated political opponents or people suspected of being so, and the wider population still face widespread persecution and human rights abuse.
Not content with this, the Danes are widely reported to be in discussion with Rwanda to construct immigration camps on Rwandan soil with a view to transporting people seeking asylum in Denmark 4,000 miles south to an African country with its own poor human rights record. And the UK Home Office appears desperate to adopt the same “offshore processing” game plan.
It is widely reported that UK officials are in talks about the emerging Danish scheme.
Meanwhile, yesterday the home secretary introduced a Nationality and Borders Bill including new powers for her to withhold or diminish the rights of people seeking asylum as punishment for them not seeking it elsewhere.
As with Denmark, the naked ambition is to deter anyone from exercising their right to look for sanctuary in the UK. To do this, the UK government proposes to unilaterally rewrite the shared obligations to which it with others signed up under the Refugee Convention.
This reckless disrespect of international law on the part of these two countries is all the more striking given that each country already receives very few people seeking asylum compared to their European neighbours. Tuesday’s other Euro semi-finalists, Italy and Spain, receive many more asylum claims and provide safety to more refugees than the UK and Denmark combined.
Although, the policies and practices of Italy and Spain can also do great harm to many refugees who look for safety in those countries. These challenges seem unlikely to be resolved while European countries, with fewer asylum applicants, refuse to fairly share the task of providing sanctuary. Depressingly, neither Denmark nor the UK seems willing to help.
Both countries have long been among Europe’s leading shirkers of responsibility in the global refugee system, which has saved countless lives. That system should and could be improved by sharing responsibility with their neighbours and other countries rather than further dismantling their shoddy and meagre commitment.
Providing a safe place to people escaping conflict, torture and other abuses is meant to be a shared endeavour on the part of all nations, socially and culturally enriching for new arrivals and welcoming communities alike.
Whoever wins tonight’s match, tomorrow will see a return to the mediocrity and meanness of politics in both the UK and Denmark. As Bill Shankly said, “football is not a matter of life and death” unlike reality for those fleeing the world’s horrors.
Steve Valdez-Symonds is refugee and migrant rights programme director at Amnesty International UK
