The European Union and its member states have developed a blueprint for circumventing and outsourcing their human rights obligations to asylum seekers and migrants, especially those from Africa and the Middle East.; from pushing them back to other countries, to striking deals with abusive governments, to keep them outside of the European bloc.
This response has exposed the EU's own double standards in honoring its human rights commitments and contributed to a growing, fear by portraying migration as an unmanageable security concern. Some EU member states have even gone so far as to criminalize providing humanitarian aid to migrants and asylum seekers.
The United States has its own strategies for evading its legal obligations to those seeking to cross its borders.
Policies aimed at preventing migrants and asylum seekers from reaching the US, jointly implemented by the US and Mexico, have left many struggling to obtain protection or legal status. The US has closed off legal pathways to entry, criminalized migration, and created a shrinking and unnavigable asylum infrastructure.
The human cost is tragic: families ripped apart, protection denied, and asylum seekers stranded in northern Mexico, where they are left vulnerable to being killed, disappeared, raped, extorted, or subjected to other abuses.
These violations are being carried out despite international legal protections for refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers – protections that have their roots in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Yet some authorities choose to ignore this asylum process and shirk their human rights obligations to all migrants.