A few days ago, the Guardian published the findings of an investigation by its reporters into a new, tragic category of disappeared person. Across Europe – in Lampedusa, on the Polish border, in northern France and elsewhere – more than 1,000 anonymous graves now signal the final resting place of migrants who lost everything in the search for a better life, including their identity.
Close to Calais, the graves are marked simply “X”. In Croatia and Poland, plaques state “NN” – Latin for name unknown. In border regions across the continent, over 2,000 unidentified bodies pile up in shipping containers or hospital morgues. Meagre possessions – a Manchester United souvenir badge or a pair of hairdressing scissors – testify to the passions and hopes of the individual who lost their lives. Thousands of miles away, relatives living in some of the poorest, most troubled parts of the world suffer in ignorance of their loved ones’ fate.
This reporting, conducted in collaboration with the Border Graves Investigation project, is so heart-rending because to be human is to possess a name and a unique value. After the second world war, an edifice of international law was erected to protect this fundamental and universal truth, affirming the dignity of the person following the dehumanising horror of the concentration camps. It was in this context that the 1951 refugee convention established the right of every asylum seeker to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them.
It is to the lasting shame of the post-Brexit Conservative party that it has sought to discredit and delegitimise this human rights legacy. In contravention of its international obligations regarding irregular migrants, Rishi Sunak’s government is scurrilously focused instead on the need to prevent individuals from telling their stories at all.
Unveiling his Rwanda bill last week, Mr Sunak boasted that it would be “vanishingly rare” for any asylum seeker to be able to make a case in court for remaining in Britain. As the right of his party indicated that this sidelining of the legal process was still not draconian enough, the new illegal migration minister, Michael Tomlinson, pleaded on Tuesday that even during wartime some claims had been heard. That this should need to be said testifies to a party that has lost its ethical bearings. It is unconscionable that desperate people from Afghanistan, Syria or Somalia should be viewed as a kind of human cargo, subject to a mechanical process of detention and deportation.
In what increasingly appear to be the end times for this government, it is tempting to turn the gaze inwards. The crisis over the Rwanda bill tells us much about the exhausted, derelict condition of Mr Sunak’s administration. Warring tribes within the party, plotting for the aftermath of an expected election defeat next year, have become all but ungovernable. Mr Sunak’s attempt to create a Brexit redux moment – with the European court of human rights playing the role of foreign bogeyman – has served only to resurrect the profile of pound-shop “patriots” such as Mark Francois on the party’s hard right.
But the bigger picture matters more. The government’s “small boats” strategy effectively seeks to turn some of the world’s most vulnerable people into non-persons, undeserving of sympathy or a hearing. It is an attempt to “unsee” individual suffering, to park it somewhere far away. This failure to grant the stranger basic dignity and respect marks a moral nadir in British politics.
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