Although it is still far from clear whether an (extreme) right-wing cabinet will be formed, there is an increasing belief that the asylum policy is unsustainable and drastic measures are necessary. The forming parties even speak of a ‘national crisis’ that would necessitate a temporary freeze on applications. The numbers far exceed the reception capacity and the costs are completely out of hand, according to Wilders, supported by BBB, NSC and the VVD. Now these parties know very well that such a stop is legally impossible and that the numbers of asylum seekers, approximately at the level of the 1990s, make the declaration of a state of emergency unbelievable. Not to mention the fact that the ‘asylum crisis’ is the result of the refusal of the VVD in particular to maintain a decent reception capacity after 2015.
Rwanda
The fuss therefore serves another purpose, namely to prepare the minds of voters for the idea that we are really over our heads and that the 1951 Refugee Convention is completely outdated. Sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, as recently approved by the British Parliament, or closing the borders, as in Denmark, are presented as promising perspectives by (extreme) right-wing politicians such as Geert Wilders and Joost Eerdmans. And they hardly get a response from Caroline van der Plas, Pieter Omtzigt or Dilan Yesilgöz. In fact, those parties seem to agree with this.
According to the Jewish lawyers Lemkin and Robinson, the Holocaust did not hold up an anti-Semitic mirror to us, but a general racist mirror
These parties are not concerned about the fact that a Nexit is necessary for the Rwanda option and that Denmark – unlike the Netherlands – has agreed to be allowed to pursue its own migration policy upon joining the European Community. We’ll see about that later, the thinking seems to be, let’s first shake off the human rights feathers.
Auschwitz
In this context, it is useful to go back to the late 1940s, when the shockwave of Auschwitz and other horrors of Hitler’s Nazi empire exposed the dehumanizing effects of Nazism and fascistism. After the failure of the League of Nations, founded in 1919, the United Nations was founded on October 24, 1945 under the leadership of the Americans, followed by a large number of treaties aimed at anchoring human rights globally and preventing genocide. Although this ‘humanitarian revolution’ had a strong Western bias and colonial powers stipulated that it would not apply to policy in their colonies, the belief that it involved universal principles played an important role from the outset.
This applied not only to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but also to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In both cases, Jewish lawyers (such as Raphael Lemkin and Jacob Robinson), some of them Holocaust survivors, were closely concerned. For example, Robinson, in close collaboration with Danish Prime Minister Knud Larsen – who had played an important role in saving the Danish Jewish community – advocated a universal and global application of the Refugee Convention. The fact that this ultimately failed and the treaty was limited to refugees in Europe, partly due to pressure from colonial powers, does not alter the fact that a general humanitarian principle was the starting point from the start. And this principle was established by the New York Protocol in 1967 under pressure from the wave of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.
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The asylum crisis is a political fabrication of the PVV and VVD
Racist mirror
In this light, it is ironic that politicians like Wilders who claim that the Refugee Convention is outdated, do speak out about the threat to Jews, but refuse to stand up for Palestinians and other persecuted groups. They shout the loudest that the advancing anti-Semitism must be stopped, education must pay more attention to the Holocaust and Israel must be supported through thick and thin. Jewish lawyers such as Lemkin and Robinson, but also the Israeli government of the time, would have strongly disagreed with this.
For them, the Holocaust held up to us not a private anti-Semitic, but a general racist mirror. And apart from that, they viewed the relationship between persecution and refugees as a general human phenomenon. This belief is reflected in particular in Article Three of the Refugee Convention, which states: ‘The Contracting States shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination on grounds of race, religion or country of origin’. A formulation that Robinson and Larsen in particular fought hard for and which stands in stark contrast to the ‘Own Europeans first’ mood of today.
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