The Bible is a book where flight, exile, migration constitute a kind of norm. Nothing is more “normal” for people, families, clans, even entire peoples, to move from one place to another, driven by wars, famines, political reasons or conflicts. family. The very identity of the Hebrew people consecrated by its covenant with God is that of an exiled people who receive very clear recommendations about the attention to be given to the emigrant, whom it is a question of treating “ as one (as one) of yours” (Lv 19, 33-34). This call to commit to the rights and dignity of those who do not belong to the dominant group runs through the biblical heritage and the churches, when they have acted according to this ethical principle – which of course was not always the case – they were able to defend the causes of migrants and exiles.
Today, in view of the vote on 15 May next, a group of theologians, theologians, priests and pastors, ministers of the Churches from all over the country have come together to defend a no to Switzerland’s support for the Frontex border protection system. Many of these people also participate in a national action carried out each year in June: it is called “Naming them by their name” and is organized around the public reading of the more than 45,000 names of people listed since 1993 who died on the paths of migration trying to reach Europe, by land or by sea. To precisely show that it is not a question of numbers (even if they are terrible) but of names, of people, human lives.
On behalf of this group, relying also on the appeal of parties, associations and works including the Swiss Protestant Mutual Aid which plead for the reintroduction of the right to file an asylum application in Swiss embassies (an object which has just been refused again by the Council of States), I ask that our country guarantee legal and safe channels for exiled people.
If so many people die while seeking refuge in Europe, it is because they are prevented from exercising their fundamental right to seek asylum in a European country. This is because Europe prefers a police and military response to migratory movements. And, I can’t help saying it, it’s because Europe has lost its ‘soul’, that of a continent which has lived through two wars in a century and which has lost its way today. today, no longer knowing how to offer protection to the vulnerable when they call for help, refusing to see that it is from its very lands that so many emigrants left, that so many of them had to escape poverty or violence.
To refuse the extension of Frontex is to refuse to endorse an unjust system where people seeking refuge have no chance of being heard. It is to refuse a system where the reality of migration (which is a fundamental “problem” through which – and I would say thanks to which – humanity builds itself and learns what it is) is pushed back as far as possible and as denied in an administrative and security management which is an outrage to the humanity of the people who ask for protection and at the same time an outrage to ours.
Alexandre Winter,
Pastor of the Protestant Church of Geneva (EPG)
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