Our political charter

Our foundations

The Migreurop network, which was created at the European Social Forum in Florence (Italy) in 2002 and officially established as an association in 2005, is composed of human rights organisations, activists and researchers from 18 countries in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East. The network affirms its desire to work collectively and coordinate its efforts to defend the rights of people on the move and promote freedom of
movement and settlement. These objectives imply:

• The end of : barriers to mobility, militarisation of borders, formal and informal administrative detention, various forms of deportation, and the externalisation of border control and asylum.

• Respect for the right to mobility and freedom of movement, considering that the right to migrate is an economic, social and political right. We therefore reject the utilitarian model that subjects migration to capitalist and post-colonial modes of production by reducing people to their labour power alone.

Far from focusing solely on institutional policies and their effects, we place central importance on the way in which those most affected circumvent, confront and transgress unequal immigration policies on a daily basis and exercise their right to mobility.

Our approach

The network brings together actors from the North and South to develop a shared vision and analysis of these processes, particularly with regard to the externalisation of migration management policies, the detention of people on the move, and the strengthening of border security.

Our work is structured around three areas:

• Documenting: Migreurop collects and systematises field information on the living conditions of migrants, their (lack of) access to rights, and the violence they suffer throughout their journey into exile. The network also documents the development, evolution and application of migration policies in Europe and beyond (in Africa and the Middle East).

• Interpreting: Migreurop brings together the information collected through the joint work of its individual and associative members, researchers and activists. Migreurop produces shared, multidisciplinary analyses of the consequences of migration policies on the lives of people on the move and the societies in which we live, on a regional scale and from a historical perspective. The network then formats these analyses through the development of various decryption tools (short analysis notes, position papers, critical atlases and maps, observation/mission reports, podcasts and videos).

• Denounce: Based on these documented analyses, Migreurop denounces European migration policies (including outsourced policies) that are hostile to people on the move, clearly naming the multifaceted and deadly reality of barriers to mobility, such as the closure of borders, the encampment of people, the war on migrants, and mobility apartheid. The network nurtures and supports Euro-African civil society organisations and the mobilisation of people on the move, its members and partners: sharing and disseminating tools, capacity-building activities for its members, and raising awareness among the general public.

Our fundamental positions

• · Ending the detention of foreigners, repression, racism and violence in migration policies in the North and South:  

See the positioning statement: "For the closure of camps for foreigners in Europe and beyond" (2010)

From the 1990s, a new phase began in European migration policy: it became increasingly difficult to enter the Schengen area legally and safely. The European Union (EU) then entered a new era of border control, marked by the destruction of certain rights to freedom of movement and settlement opportunities, with the introduction of visa requirements and sanctions against companies transporting people without the required travel documents.

The tightening of conditions for access to European territory has materialised at borders and elsewhere in the form of detention in places of administrative deprivation of liberty – with increasingly prison-like conditions – and other forms of exclusion, sorting and encampment. Technological devices and practices of surveillance and migration control at external borders have given rise to a veritable security market, while highlighting the paradox of increasingly deadly humanitarian-military policies and the hypocrisy of so-called ‘welcome’ policies.

Since it began operating in 2005, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) has played an increasingly important role in implementing the European Union’s ultra-security-focused migration policy. Endorsed by European institutions, which have spent the last twenty years strengthening its powers in terms of control and deportation, as well as its budget and military equipment, the agency is nevertheless accused of repeated rights violations, including complicity and/or complacency in cases of refoulement at European borders.

Since the 2000s, asymmetrical agreements have been concluded with third countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ to facilitate the deportation of illegal foreign nationals in Europe, through multiple and increasingly informal negotiation frameworks. Official development assistance is thus diverted from its primary objectives, such as poverty reduction and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals; it has become a bargaining chip for the offshoring of migration control to Africa and other regions, while so-called third countries attempt to take advantage of the opportunities offered by these negotiations.

Over the past 20 years, the increasing externalisation of European borders has led to the widespread adoption of a range of practices: maritime surveillance, information and deterrence campaigns against immigration, detention, delegation of asylum responsibilities, securing humanitarian practices, training of border guards, alignment of the legislation of non-EU countries with that of Member States, etc. Externalisation has been facilitated by the emergence of global migration governance under the impetus of international organisations such as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which are complicit in the establishment of an unequal border regime linked to the neoliberal and capitalist economic model.

As a result of the externalisation of repressive European migration policies, global migration governance and the ambivalence of countries of departure, racism and xenophobia targeting racialised migrants ‘legitimise’ the authorities of transit and destination countries to carry out, with impunity, campaigns of mass refoulement and deportation, pushing these people ever further and towards more dangerous routes.

In Europe and Africa, the frequent association of migrants with transnational criminal networks in political discourse and the media contributes to creating a conflation of immigration and crime. The criminalisation of ‘smugglers’ and of practices such as facilitation, assistance or mutual aid in migration situations is intensifying. The adoption of laws ‘against migrant smuggling’ actually increases the distress of foreign nationals, exposing them to imprisonment and new forms of abuse, while contributing to the flourishing of a border business. In recent years, in the Maghreb and West Africa, violations of human rights and solidarity have multiplied, with the arrest of civil society activists on particularly serious charges, exposing them to prison sentences or even the death penalty.

But the violence of migration policies does not stop at causing death. It continues after death, in the denial of the value of migrants’ lives, in the relegation of their bodies and memories to the margins. As direct victims of border control, these deaths encourage collective memory struggles in the absence of institutional investigations, to retrace the circumstances of the deaths, recover and repatriate the bodies, and support the families of the deceased in their struggles for truth and dignity.

• · Promoting freedom of movement as an alternative to deadly migration policies

See the statement :"Solemn appeal for freedom of movement" (2013)

In the European context outlined above, the idea of free movement within the Schengen area is more a matter of rhetoric than concrete reality: it excludes the most vulnerable citizens and ‘inactive’ persons, certain workers, stigmatised communities, as well as third-country nationals and their families, who are subject to border controls based on racial profiling.

Over the past 15 years or so, the issue of freedom of movement and settlement for foreigners has gradually become a subject of analysis for the Migreurop network, following the movements of so-called ‘undocumented’ people and in response to the impasse of ‘case-by-case’ regularisations. This theme has also gained prominence in the face of the gradual normalisation of violence at borders, used as a deterrent strategy. It has also emerged in response to the illusory nature of the ‘triple win’ approach at the heart of the Global Compact for Migration (2018), according to which international migration could benefit all parties — sending countries, receiving countries and migrants themselves. However, the Compact—a non-legally binding instrument—sets out contradictory objectives by promoting temporary, circular and flexible labour migration (often favoured by receiving States) while seeking to guarantee family reunification, even though seasonal mobility strategically tends to exclude families from their rights to settle. In international jargon, ‘facilitating’ mobility also refers to another practice to which the network is strongly opposed: the deportation of people in an irregular administrative situation, which occurs for many workers after their temporary residence permit has expired.

Since the 2015 reception crisis in the European Union, which was nothing more than a crisis of its own immigration and asylum policies, the measures adopted have been part of a strategy to exploit the migration issue, deployed by the European authorities to promote the strengthening of the capacities of EU agencies (Frontex, Europol, but also the European Asylum Agency - EUAA, formerly EASO) and to continue to flout the fundamental rights of individuals, both on its territory and in the regions targeted by its border externalisation policy. Since its creation, the network has defined the policy pursued by European authorities and their partners as a ‘war on migrants’, given the belligerent hostility and the grim tally of deaths caused by freedom-destroying migration policies. The need to rethink collective imaginaries is therefore obvious to us. Defending freedom of movement allows us to break out of the cycle of increasingly repressive migration management policies, which can be observed in all countries where the network is active. This fight gives us the opportunity to shift the debate by refusing to align ourselves with the terms imposed by our political opponents. We reject any logic of sorting the people we could ‘welcome’ and refuse to debate the criteria that would determine this sorting.

All over the world, some people enjoy the right to welcome, leave, come, settle or leave again, free from state, economic, colonial, racial or sexual domination. They experience freedom of movement in action.

Our commitment to freedom of movement and settlement for all is based on a fundamental observation: this freedom is twofold in nature. It remains an ideal to be achieved for some, but is already a concrete reality for others. This duality leads us to consider this freedom not as a utopia, but as a means and an achievable goal, because it already partially exists.

However, this freedom only has meaning and can only be persued if it is based on strict equality of treatment between foreign nationals and citizens. It therefore requires a determined collective struggle against all forms of discrimination and racism. The universality of the right to freedom of movement and settlement admits no compromise.