Ana Rosenthal Mena from the Camden group attended this event and wrote this short and very interesting report for City of Sanctuary:
I went to the All-Party Parliamentary Group Meeting on Refugees at the Houses of Parliament on the 2nd February. The event was titled: From Damascus to Dunkirk, Responding humanely to refugees at our border.
The meeting aimed to discuss the UK’s response to the refugee crisis. With two refugee camps (Calais and Dunkirk) just a few miles from out shores, how should the UK respond to refugees at its border? What role does the British government have to play alongside neighbouring France?
The discussion attempted to question how the UK’s actions relate and compare to the wider global refugee crisis. The purpose of the conference was to give a general overview of the current political situation and a sense of what various non-governmental groups and civil society actors have been working on. There were a number of Syrian refugees in the audience.
Dr Natalie Roberts, UK Refugees and Migration Advisor, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): opened the meeting by sharing some of the background statistics behind the current global refugee crisis. More than 1 million have now reached Europe through irregular means in 2015, the vast majority arriving via Greece. Approximately 25% of these displaced people are children. Many of them have family or friends living in the UK. Roberts called for safer and legal routes, pointing to the high number of smuggler routes that have been created from this crisis. Roberts claimed that Europe is doing little to protect and help vulnerable refugee children and families from drowning on our shores. In her view, the method for these children and families to seek asylum is through family re-unification and contacts they may have in the UK.
Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, British Refugee Council: spoke more generally about the global context of refugees and internally displaced people (IDP). He reminded us that nearly 60 million people are currently fleeing conflict or persecution around the world. Wren suggested that the problem in Northern France should not be viewed separately from its global context, but that it is a short term problem the UK and French government ought to face together. He stated that the camps in Northern France have been fully dependent on the support of volunteers to survive and it is insufficient for the UK government to claim it is a French problem. The issue is that until now UK policies have been focused on containment and denial of the problem, and the result is that there are no legal avenues of escape. He highlighted how the percentage of approved Syrian visa applications has decreased. In 2010, approximately 70% of all Syrian visa applications were approved, and now the number is less than 40%.
Yvette Cooper MP, Chair of the Labour Taskforce on Refugees: argued the need for greater political order and sanctuary. Cooper began her talk by sharing three heartfelt stories that have been most personal to her. She made a clear point that young children are the most vulnerable to this current crisis. In her view, the government is not doing enough to protect these young children from taking risks themselves and being exploited by gangs. Cooper reiterated the need to challenge the politics in the face of growing anxiety in Europe and the UK.
Alex Fraser, Head of Refugees Support, British Red Cross: introduced the fieldwork missions of the ICRC in Calais and Dunkirk. He shared a number of personal stories that have struck him from his time at Calais, and reminded the public that most people have arrived there through illegal and unsafe routes. Fraser pointed to the importance of political will to find protection for these people and a move away from ‘a business as usual approach’.
At the end of the meeting, David Davies MP instantly stood up and accused the Panel of wanting to live in a world of open borders, and made the claim that the Panel was deliberately misleading the public and ignoring issues of extremism. He claimed that the people living in Calais and Dunkirk, were not families, as we had been made to believe, but ‘angry young men’ who pose a threat to our society, and more specifically, to our women — and he used the recent attacks in Cologne as an example.
A young man in the room stood up, and said that he was Syrian and had spent two months living in the Jungle before arriving in the UK. He asked David Davies why he thinks men don’t deserve the same protection as women and children. He challenged Davies if he found him threatening and a possible threat to women in the public, or whether this was the stereotype he holds for all Syrian men. He also shared the story of his journey by boat to the UK, telling us that the people who had made the treacherous journey were doctors, engineers and respectful people simply wanting to survive and help their families.