The Inevitable Endpoint of EU Refugee and Border Policy Spells Genocide

There has been abundant reporting recently on the continuously ongoing exercise in inhumanity that is European Union refugee policy. Alas, the focus is often on singular incident, such as the recent tragedy of the sunken both that had at least 700 die of drowning in the Mediterranean (here, here, here). However, already several month ago, BBC reported that in the course of just a few months last year, over 2 200 people were estimated to have lost their lives due to similar causes in these deadly sea. A more recent report from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is cited by the same source as implicating an expectation of the number of people meeting similar destinies in the Mediterranean alone will reach 30 000 this year (also reported here), and other sources note that the number of refugee deaths in the Mediterranean is already 30 times higher this year compared to the same period in the former. A detailed map of all registered deaths since the year 2000 can be found here.

As dryly noted by well-known public health educator, and my countryman, Hans Rosling in a recent video – rhetorically answering the cynical question why refugees don't fly instead, as this is much cheaper and safer – the primary cause of this development can be located almost entirely in the inhuman border and refugee policies of the European Union and its member states:

 

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True to this essence of European policy in this area, in the 2014, the UK announced that it would cancel all further engagement in missions to rescue victims of capsizing refugee boats, leading to sharp reactions, e.g., from Amnesty International. In a similar spirit, the European Union has reacted to the more recent outcries, with a 10-point plan, most of which is nothing else than just more of business as usual, as noted by, e.g., Human Rights Watch. For the essence of EU border and refugee policy is to stretch its supposed commitment to international asylum agreements to its limits, bearing in mind that the right to ask for asylum starts at the border points of a country and keep the eyes shut to the devastating consequences of this sort of policy:

1. KEEP THEM OUT! 

"the EU's maritime patrolling operations in the Mediterranean, called Triton and Poseidon"

"capture and destroy vessels used by the people smugglers" 

2. PREFERABLY BY PREVENTING THEM FROM NEVER ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE!

 "EU will engage with countries surrounding Libya through a joint effort between the Commission and the EU's diplomatic service."

"The EU will deploy immigration liaison officers abroad to gather intelligence on migratory flows and strengthen the role of the EU delegations

3. AND IF THEY HAPPEN TO REACH THE EU, GET THEM OUT AS QUICK AS POSSIBLE!

"European Union's asylum support office will to deploy teams in Italy and Greece for joint processing of asylum applications."

"EU governments will fingerprint all migrants."

"EU will consider options for an "emergency relocation mechanism" for migrants."

"EU will establish a new return program for rapid return of "irregular" migrants coordinated by EU agency Frontex from the EU's Mediterranean countries."

At the same time, similar thinking is shaping this adaption to European Union border and refugee policy standards by Bulgaria (along its border to Turkey), which hopes to be admitted as full member shortly and therefore implements this perversity, apparently failing to note the bitter ironic link to its own iron curtain past (also here):

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This is the voice of three monkeys failing to register the complete unsustainability of their chosen path. Or, let me be more precise, this path is completely unsustainable as long as the European Union recognises the notion of its lack of rights to commit organised mass murder. For at the end of the day, this is the only conceivable endpoint that this policy can have.

The idea that capturing a few criminals, currently exploiting the desperate situation of refugees created by European Union policies, would somehow make said refugees stop attempting to finalise their escape is nothing but plain stupidity. Once these bands are dealt with, there will instead be the initiatives of others, not least refugees themselves and ordinary people trying to help them. For the need to escape is not created by these minor border bands of cynic criminals, those are mere symptoms of an infinitely more cynic and inferior way of responding to the ever present needs that have had refugees on their way across history and the world since the dawn of humanity. At that point, the EU will face the choice of continuing the policy and thus deploy the military and police forces referred to in its 10-point programme to start attacking the refugees themselves, besides anyone aiding them. Similarly regarding the idea to "engage with countries surrounding Libya" (and other bordering countries, as the need arises) and "strengthen the role of the EU delegations", effectively to have bordering countries set up concentration camps funded by the EU, to effectively lock the refugees up to stop further escape (a recent analysis by Doctor's without Borders of how bad the situation is in this respect already now is here). Again, the question then arises what will be the EU policy when these incarcerated people – as they have all reason and every moral right to do – attempt to break out. In both cases, the logic of current EU policy seems to dictate  nothing less than genocide. Whether or not it is performed by proxy or bona fide European armed personnel is, in this case, completely irrelevant.

But, of course, my point is that this analysis demonstrates the complete unsustainability of current European Union border and migration policy. Especially pondering that current refugee and migration streams are in fact nothing compared to what may be expected in the future due to the effects of climate change and other environmental problems (also effecting economic and social instability and war in their aftermath), one can easily see that it can end up nowhere else than in massive genocide on desperate people fleeing destitution or other dire circumstances. Pondering the constitutional backbones of the EU, such as the European Convention of Human Rights (not to speak of EU member states' uniform commitment to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), this should effect careful consideration of the increasingly apparent folly of the current policy path among European policy makers and high officials. Is this how you want to end up; as mass murderers on a grand scale – is that what Europe and the European Union is about? This is the question that those three monkeys desperately seek to avoid.

More on the UK Sellout of NHS Medical Data and Records: How to Opt Out and How It's Being Hidden

Just a few days ago I once again pointed to the relentless determination of the UK government to set up a sellout of individual medical data and information, collected in the medical records of the ordinary patients of the National Health Service who have never signed up as research subjects , to private interests, such as the pharmacological industry and health insurance companies. This apparently without any type of safeguard for the many misuses easily imagined as an effect of such official recklessness.

Now it turns out I was wrong. There is one safeguard, namely that you as an individual UK citizen may actively opt out of the scheme while still using the benefits of the NHS. This possibility is, one guesses, mandated by basic legal consideration and presumably by EU constitutional and human rights law as well. However, the UK authorities seem to be doing their very best to hide this option from the public, possibly realizing that the free access to private heath data of private business interests making rather easy identification of individual identities quite likely will scare the living daylights out of a lot of people. Of course, thereby making the whole design stink even more in the process.

In any case, luckily, there are vigilant bloggers around, who sniff out scams like this and provide the service to citizens that public authorities paid for the purpose fail to do. In this particular case, Med Confidential tells you more exactly how this way out for anyone who don't want to risk the substantial downsides of the "business friendly" attitude to privacy and confidentiality championed by Mr. Cameron's government has been actively obscured and how you may access and use it – providing easy to download links to the opting out form you need to fill out and submit for yopur right to take legal effect,

Read more here!

UK Set to Sell Out it's Population's Medical Data and Records to Private Industry and Health Insurers

I posted almost a year back about a then apparently more restrictive, but to my eyes still outrageous, move of the UK government to frivolously open up a genomic database created out of the medical records and samples collected within the NHS in the course of normal health care (for diagnostics, safety and quality assurance purposes) for research not only by public research institutions, but also private companies in the pharmacological and medical technological area. Now, if this lengthy account is to be belived, it transpires that, apparently, the data base, which is due to be launched later this year, is not only genomic, but simply a general health research database created out of the entire medical history of the entire NHS "cohort", complete with rather specific personal information. It will not contain straightforward identification of individuals, but even government spokespeople admit that the "pseudo-anonymization" planned to be applied allows any research institution with access to a lot of informationto re-identify individual people, not even mentioning at all the recent discovery that just a little bit of genetic information together with publicly available online information can be used to trace people who have anonymously donated tissue to research.

But that's not the end of it: among the players which will be eligible to apply for access to this goldmine for – true – advanced medical knowledge and – equally true – the health business opportunity of the century are – hold your breath – health insurance companies. Yes indeed, the very same one's who are widely known to do their very best to exclude those people who are in most need of their product from buying it and to refuse paying out compensation if they are ever accidentally let in. These are the ones who the UK government and the NHS experts behind the new Health and Social Care Information Centre (which will be responsible for handling the database and provide the access) think are suitable parties to be helped to identify the heath frailties of individual persons, their children, family and so on. Mark Davies, who is something as peculiar as the "public assurance director" (let that one roll around your palate for a second, doesn't it taste a bit like "top blinker"?) of the HSCIC, pressed by reporters, admits a "theoretical risk" – apparently having never entertained the obvious thought that for an insurance company, identifying people's health risks as part of the general process mentioned above is a rational business procedure. If it's possible (and it is - even more easy than admitted by Mr. Davies), it will be standard procedure for a number possible purposes – everything from even more effectively than now screening people in need out from health insurance or compensation payment, to restructuring existing insurance schemes to more effectively weed out the potentially unprofitable customers by having no product that suits them. The "assurances" about transparency ring hollower than ever before as Julia Hippisley-Cox speaks of the right of people to be able to know who sits on their data and a "clear audit trail". Won't matter much when coverage of your recent surgery bill is being refused, will it?

Not very surprisingly, there's been criticism and debate, but the UK government seems to entertain no plan of setting a few sensible safeguards for those ordinary people who are supposed to profit from the scheme in place. Such as forcing private industry to commission any research using the database from public research institutions – thereby making redundant the reckless move of transferring data into the commercial secrecy protected hands of these far from public interest oriented parties, where as critics point put, no one will know where they will then go or how they will be used.

Read more here.

Further Complications with the US Argument for 'Punishing' Syria for Chemical Attacks: Hypocricy and Lack of Foundation

So, yesterday I had a post pointing to a piece by Udo Schuklenk, rather convincingly picking apart the US case for military attacking Syria as a 'punishment' for the current regime's alleged chemical warfare attacks against civilians. Today, I found two further reasons against any such idea, besides the numerous ones presented by Udo:

1. Articles in The Daily Mail, making public solid evidence to the effect that the UK, whose prime minister David Cameron has apparently swallowed president Obama's argument for an attack whole and unchewed and made motions in parliament to gain support for this line (to no effect, so far), has for many years when Syria was suspected of stockpiling chemical weapons agents, like sarin, exported ingredients for manufacturing exactly such agents to Syria with the government's and relevant agencies' open approval and license. The ingredient in question is one that in other contexts is perfectly innocent or benign, namely sodium fluoride (an ingredient in almost all tooth paste and sometimes added to drinking water to boost population dental health), but as here described, also a necessary bit in the manufacturing of sarin, which is exactly the gas claimed by the US to have been used by the Assad regime (and famous since the terrorist attacks in the Tokyo underground in 1995). It wouldn't surprise me one bit if also other of those countries now contemplating jumping onto the US attack wagon, at least if UN support can be produced, similarly have exported this or some other part of the alleged Syrian chemical weapons arsenal – in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if also the US government can be found to have done the same.

The relevance of this for Obama's argument is the following: If the Syrian regime is to be punished by a military attack (that will most certainly kill lots of people having nothing to do with the matter, besides being unlucky enough to reside inside Syrian territory – nobody believes in the fairy tales about precision warfare anymore), then surely a proportional punishment has to be directed at those that have aided and abetted such a serious act. That is, if the alleged action of the Assad regime is to be seen as a crime worthy of such a degree of punishment (including foreseeable collateral damages of substantial proportion), surely aiding and abetting such a crime must be viewed as deserving a punishment in the same ballpark, although at a more moderate proportion in the same way that assisting a murder deserves less punishment than the murder itself. Note that the argument that the aiding was unwitting does not hold up to scrutiny, since the UK and the rest of the countries here viewed Syria as a danger from the chemical weapons perspective already in those times and were fully well informed about the military application of sodium fluoride.

So, it would seem, that the same legal logic invoked by president Obama to motivate attacking Syria would force him to the conclusion that if, say, Damascus is to be bombed in punishment for the alleged attack, then some more minor part of the UK – say Middlesbrough or Bristol – should be in for a similar treatment.And it doesn't end there, for it would also seem that David Cameron himself, as a matter of legal logic, would have to accept and support such a conclusion. Lovely, isn't it?

2. Now, and this is something that dawned on my today, there's a basic fault of the whole attempt to try to make a legal argument in support of a military attack aimed at punishing a country's leaders or its officer's at lower levels for an alleged crime. This argument requires that due process is applied, and what Obama has suggested is far from that. Due process would seem to require that those that are suspects in the crime are apprehended for subsequent inquiry and investigation by the International Criminal Court – not that Damascus or whatever other place is contemplated by the Washington hawks as a fitting target is reduced to a pile of rubble, possibly killing the Syrian leadership possibly responsible for chemical attacks together with a huge bunch of other people, without anything even resembling trial. There is only one problem: the USA, for entirely selfish reasons, is on record as actively working against the ICC and its underlying idea of installing a legally secure institution for punishing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In conclusion: Obama's argument relies on the idea of applying due legal process and rule of law, while what he suggests is the opposite. Not only that, he represents a country that is an active enemy of the very notion of such rule of law.

So, in the end, it would seem that, even discounting for the blind eye towards those who have made the alleged chemical attack possible and the hypocricy implied by that – the entire attempt of the US regime and president Obama to dress up in legal garment what is, I suppose, in the end the same old 'preventive self-defense' rubbish as usual, fails even more splendidly than argued by Udo yesterday.

Now, should Obama change his mind and accept, as EU leaders now seem keen on, that an ICC-based due process handling of the alleged chemical attack of the Syrian regime is applied, as would seem logical in view of the legal argument made, such a due process would also have to include, of course, the crime of aiding and abetting such alleged criminal behaviour, which in turn would seem to imply that David Cameron and relevant ministers (of security, defense and foreign trade) should, at the very least, be held for questioning and possible a number of other governments should be in for the same treatment. A little something for the EU council of ministers to contemplate in their further musings on this matter.

Outrage and disgrace in the UK: NHS genetics database laws allow selling people's health data against their will to private companies

Yes, apparently, the safeguards put into place in the UK laws and rules around a planned national genomic database – created out of the biological samples collected from people in the regular process of sample taking and diagnostics for regular NHS health care purposes – to protect individuals from undue harm and integrity breaches are far less than satisfactory. They provide ample room for commercial companies to purchase individual and identifiable genetic information without any consent of the people concerned. At least, this is what an analysis performed by the independent investigative platform Ethics and Genetics suggests, and the claim is solid and credible enough to be outed today in a lengthy article in The Guardian.

To my eyes, from what is brought to the fore by these two documentations of the matter, this is a major scandal, outrage and a disgraceful – yet predictable – consequence of the completely irresponsible hurry with which the government of David Cameron has tried to tear down the barriers between, on the one hand, genuinely societal public interests and common goods and, on the other, the the petty interests of private entrepreneurs and business operations to make another little bit of money with regard to the health and health care related needs of ordinary people. It is, to my eyes, particularly mind-boggling that a representative of what is supposed to be a conservative political party is unable to see and uphold this elementary distinction.

The easily identifiable root of the problem is, of course, the completely mindless notion of there ever being any such thing as a viable interest of a commercial party to access any of these data without consent. There are indeed cases where access to an identified individual's genetic or other health data without consent may be warranted for truly public and overwhelmingly important interests, and one may even imagine that such interests would include pure research and not only security related actions, such as in the case of communicable disease emergencies, or compassionate ones as in the very rare case of individual needs of quick diagnosis that may require access to data about relatives. However, this access would then be granted (after due scrutiny to grant permission) to institutions appointed or accredited to serve the same public interest, such as public health authorities, public hospitals, licensed doctors in care of the patient in question or, in the case of research, universities.

However, if commercial companies want to access people's genetic data for whatever purpose (several of which can easily be imagined not to be in the interest of the same people), it is their business to persuade people to provide such data to them after due information about the pros and cons, risks and befits – including the recent findings that anonymising of such data is much more difficult than previously believed. For a government to allow such access without consent would clearly violate central human rights in their UN as well as their EU variants, and in addition the Helsinki Declaration. Aside from being completely immoral in its own right regardless of what minimally decent ethical system you apply, of course.

So the solution is very simple. Amend the law with a strict and overriding ban for any commercial party to access the information stored in the planned national genomic database, and a similar ban for any party with legitimate access to give commercial parties secondhand access. This allows for all of the things in the public interest and to the benefit of the common good, such as research to develop new treatments and drugs that one may wish for. It's just that commercial companies will have to outsource some of this work to, e.g. public hospitals and universities, without gaining access to the data that they work with, while of course reaping the harvest in the form of developed products to sell.

David Cameron Loses It over UK Riots: Totalitarian Ideology and Collective Punishment

The riots in various cities of the UK during the last weeks are not easy to comment intelligently upon and, frankly, I have some sympathy for the panicky way that the UK government and police is responding. It has to be admitted that this came "from nowhere" (which is not to say that there aren't explanations, I'm talking about predictability here). And riots are exactly that: chaotic outbursts of collective and unsystematic violence where the worsts sides of human beings come to the surface; order, moderation, common sense and logic is simply not to be expected - on either side. However, society and the state bears a responsibility which the uncoordinated collective of rioters does not: It is one, organised institutional agent, committed to uphold certain basic standards and values. Among these are, of course, public order and peace, legal security, justice for victims of crime and – in the wider frame – a society where people are generally content to live (and thus not very prone to rioting). These are elementary building blocks of any well-functioning society that everyone should be able to agree on, whatever other political or ideological leanings you might entertain.

But the response of the UK government, in particular as expressed publicly by prime minister David Cameron these last few days are in this respect quite worrying. Rather than finding inspiration in the long and strong tradition of English liberal democracy, Cameron seems to turn to surprising sources for inspiration.

First, we have the notion of restricting access to internet and wireless communication – especially social media (here, here, here, here) for a rather ill-defined collective of people (those suspected of plotting riot activities). While not amounting to closing down mobile phone networks or the internet á la Syria or North Korea, it does come close to the thrawling of internet and wireless traffic in the hunt for potential dissidents and the barring off of substantial parts of the internet championed by the People's Republic of China. Now, I would not have had much complaint if all that Cameron wanted to do was to have the police use the analysis of mobile phone and internet traffic as a part of preparing arrests and prosecutions. After all, those people who have been causing mayhem during the riots are indeed criminals – and it has to be admitted that the criminal acts they have committed are made more serious due to the context of a riot. But Mr. Cameron obviously wants to go to greater lengths than that, creating a legal loophole (which some legal experts indeed claim is illegal, see the links above) for law enforcement to act proactively against a large mass of people, many of which are perfectly innocent.

Second, yesterday Cameron announced that he wants to see the entire families of (convicted?) rioters who are living in public housing estates to be evicted from their homes (see also here) as part of the punishment of the rioters. Now, here's a novel concept, to say the least, for a political conservative of a Western liberal democracy: collectively punish not only those convicted of crimes, but also their parents, their siblings and their children. This is a sort of tactics that we know from the most draconian of totalitarian societies: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and North Korea come to mind. What is more, even if the assault on freedom of information and speech involved in the measures against social media could, with some good will, be squeezed to fit into the frames of a minimally decent liberal democracy, to punish people who have done nothing against the law for the criminal actions undertaken by other people cannot. Period.

Neither will making large masses of people homeless help to secure that people in the future will not be very keen on rioting. Making people end up in a situation where they have nothing to loose is never a good recipe for upholding public order and peace. Causing such outcomes in a way that violates basic tenets of legal security and responsibility will hardly help either.

Now, parallel to this, Cameron is facing some harsh criticism for his (let's be honest) ranting in TV about how the police should have been acting tougher (see also here). Criticism, it should be noted, that comes from the police itself. Apparently, those that actually know anything about law enforcement also know that escalating spirals of collective violence is never an effective strategy in the long run for securing the standards and values of a decent society. Let's just hope that this spirit will prevail and that Mr. Cameron will revisit the basics of his political beliefs and come to his senses.