The European Union (EU) claims to be an alliance based on democracy and human rights, but sometimes it looks more like the autocrat’s best friend.

On 17 March, the European Commission’s head, Ursula von der Leyen, shared the spotlight in Cairo with Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, celebrating a deal that will see the EU provide around US$8 billion in loans, grants and support for private sector investment over the next three years. Around US$217 million of the grants package is intended to help the Egyptian government manage migration – in essence, stop people crossing the Mediterranean to get to Europe.

The deal was done despite the fact that el-Sisi, a former army general, has ruthlessly closed down civic space since taking power in a coup in 2013, with his rule subsequently sanctioned through elections that were nowhere near free or fair. His regime has jailed tens of thousands of peaceful activists, journalists, artists and opposition supporters, many under anti-terrorism laws. The authorities have blocked hundreds of websites and banned media coverage of issues they prefer to go unreported. Some civil society groups have had no choice but to close and many activists have gone into exile to escape jail. But even then they aren’t safe, since Egypt is one of the world’s worst five states for repressing exiled activists.

None of this seems to be a problem for the EU, so long as the Egyptian state promises to use its well-honed machinery of repression to stop people heading to Europe. Not for the first time, a preoccupation with migration control is trumping other concerns among Europe’s governments.

Last year the EU struck a similar deal with Tunisia which again included funding to stop migrants, and once again the fact that President Kais Saied is an authoritarian ruler who ensures those who stand up to him are locked away didn’t seem any barrier. Recently, a group of European Parliament members claimed that much of this money had been transferred directly to Saied, which can only prop up his autocratic rule. In both agreements, promises to control migration were fundamental to getting the deal done.

Political backlash

The context is one of a shifting political climate across Europe with far-right nationalist and populist parties growing in sway. Among EU member countries, they lead the government in Hungary and Italy and are part of the administration in Finland, while in Sweden the government relies on their support and the same situation may well result in the Netherlands, where a government is yet to be formed following the December 2023 election.

Elsewhere, including in France, Germany and Portugal, far-right parties are soaring in the polls and winning influence even when not in power, shaping the political debate and dragging the centre towards them as other parties look to limit their appeal by copying their policies. June European Parliament elections are likely to see far-right parties gain further ground. Von der Leyen will be aware of these political trends as she seeks a second term.

Hostility towards migrants is one of the core messages of Europe’s right-wing populists and nationalists. In tough economic times, people struggling to get by are encouraged to blame those who have least rather than demand a redistribution of economic and political power. What once were rightly considered extremist views confined to the political fringe have now been made mainstream. Far-right parties were once political pariahs, but they’ve been normalised. Standing by von der Leyen’s side on the trip to Egypt was Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party that emerged from the neofascist movement.

There are some blatant double standards on display as a result. European countries have broadly continued to welcome the many displaced by Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the end of last year, there were 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees, 5.9 living in Europe, along with 3.7 million people internally displaced within Ukraine.

Some are showing signs of compassion fatigue as the war wears on. In Ireland, housing scarcity has fuelled a backlash, expressed through an anti-migrant riot in Dublin in November 2023. The following month, the government announced it would cut its support for new arrivals from Ukraine, with the explicit aim of trying to deter further people coming from Ukraine. Across the EU, with the temporary status they were granted set to expire in 2025, Ukrainians worry about how long they may be allowed to stay.

But it’s still the case that everyone else receives far worse treatment. The same European governments that continue to welcome Ukrainians are intensifying their racist targeting of Black and Brown people from the global south.

The political pressure is telling in Germany as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s polling ratings soar. In November, the government announced harsher measures for asylum seekers, including social benefit cuts.

Greece, meanwhile, has put hostility towards migrants and refugees – and the civil society that works to help them – at the heart of its politics. It has put humanitarian workers on trial on serious charges, including espionage, people smuggling, membership of criminal organisations, fraud and money laundering – crimes that can bring jail sentences of up to 25 years. Many have been held in pretrial detention and others have been slapped with travel bans. The state has also put activists under surveillance. The government has criminalised operations to rescue migrants at sea, forcing several organisations to end their efforts. Greece has also been accused of illegal pushbacks. It’s even boasted of ‘blocking’ people at its border.

These restrictions on the rights of civil society working to help migrants and refugees were a key reason Greece’s civic space rating was downgraded from narrowed to obstructed by the CIVICUS Monitor in March 2023.

The challenge for civil society is that these actions bring governments a level of public support, which is why parties intensify anti-migrant rhetoric ahead of elections. In Greece, the ruling party, long a mainstream centre-right party, won a second term in 2023 by extensively taking on board anti-migrant policies once the preserve of the far right. This offered a textbook example of how extremist ideas infiltrate the political centre.

And yet the irony is that Greece, like Germany and several other European states, is currently experiencing labour shortages in key parts of its economy, including agriculture and services. In response, in December the Greek government granted legal recognition to thousands of undocumented migrants.

Greece is far from the only EU country accused of illegal pushbacks. In April, Lithuania passed a law legalising pushbacks in emergency situations. At the regional level, the EU stands accused of poor treatment of migrants and refugees, further contradicting its lofty human rights principles. Its border agency, Frontex, is alleged to be complicit in violence and other rights abuses. Civil society groups say its policies are at least partly to blame for the deaths of over 3,000 people last year.

Things could get worse. Last December, EU states agreed a Migration Pact that threatens to create detention centres at borders, speed up deportations and allow states to engage in pushbacks in crisis situations. Through such actions the EU erodes humanitarian solidarity and dehumanises migrants and refugees.

Offshoring migration

As well as the EU’s deals with dictators, increasing hostility is expressed in another disturbing emerging trend: offshoring migration responses, in which states pay poorer countries to host the migrants they don’t want. Australia invented this approach in 2001, dumping people in detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, but until recently it had been an outlier. Now the UK government is pushing ahead with its Rwanda plan, intending to deport people who enter the UK unlawfully to Rwanda and force them to stay there even if their asylum claims succeed.

When the government introduced the plan, it wasn’t clear whether it genuinely expected it to work or the purpose was to put the opposition on the backfoot on a hot political issue, with the ruling party floundering in the polls. Even though the UK receives far fewer asylum seekers than other major European countries, right-wing politicians and supportive media have focused heavy attention on the ‘small boats’ issue – the arrival of migrants on the UK’s south coast after crossing from France. With the government having shut down all safer routes for undocumented migrants, people are making the dangerous crossing across the world’s busiest shipping route in unsuitable craft peddled by unscrupulous trafficking gangs.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made the Rwanda plan a headline policy, but civil society has taken to the courts to try to stop him. Last November, the UK Supreme Court declared the Rwanda plan illegal on the grounds that Rwanda isn’t a safe country to send asylum seekers to. Rwanda is an authoritarian state with repressed civic space, where critics of President Paul Kagame are routinely assassinated or jailed, LGBTQI+ rights aren’t respected and migrants face discrimination.

The UK government faces in two directions, maintaining both that Rwanda is a welcoming country and also that the prospect of going there will deter people from crossing. Its reaction to the Supreme Court ruling has been to rewrite the law. It recently replaced its memorandum of understanding with Rwanda with a treaty. It’s backed this with a draft law, currently in parliament, that simply waves away the court judgment by declaring Rwanda a safe country. The bill also further limits the ability of people to mount legal actions against relocation decisions. In what’s likely an election year, the government seems determined to force the bill through and put migrants on planes before British people start voting.

The government has also announced a planned rule change to force government staff to ignore any European Court of Human Rights rulings that halt planned deportations, while many of its more extreme politicians are pushing the idea that the UK should withdraw from the European Court.

If the UK’s scheme comes into effect, it’s likely to encourage imitation. Denmark already signed a similar memorandum of understanding with Rwanda in 2021, but is yet to follow up on it. Italy has already gone down the same path. Last November its government announced a deal with Albania to relocate migrants rescued from the Mediterranean Sea, a key migration route. In return, as well as funding, Italy has promised to support Albania’s attempts to join the EU. The deal was temporarily blocked by Albania’s Constitutional Court the following month but given the go-ahead in January.

The implication that wealthier countries can simply pay poorer countries to tidy away their problems says something disturbing about how they see the world as divided into people who have rights and people who don’t. It smacks of colonialism. Political rhetoric is also helping drive discrimination and vilification in global north countries against people of colour and of non-Christian faiths.

Meanwhile, people continue to pay a lethal price for the closure of safe and legal migration routes. More than 2,500 people died crossing the Mediterranean in 2023. As these paths get choked off, migrants make still riskier journeys. Now people are trying to navigate the treacherous Atlantic Ocean to get to Spain’s Canary Islands. The number of people making the Atlantic journey from West Africa increased by over 1,000 per cent in 2023. Caminando Fronteras (‘Walking Borders’), a civil society organisation, reported that in 2023, 6,618 people died or disappeared, presumed dead, trying to cross to Spain, among them 384 children – 18 people a day.

This outrageous death toll is the consequence of states denying the reality that this is increasingly a world of people on the move. Conflict mushroomed in 2023 – around the world, one in six people are currently exposed to conflict – and it’s a huge driver of displacement. Over 114 million people are now displaced as a result of conflict, political oppression, human rights abuses, economic strife and, increasingly, climate change. Rising hostility towards migrants, refugees and displaced people isn’t going to change this reality, and nor are deals with the very dictators many are fleeing. Governments and politicians must urgently rediscover the values of empathy and compassion.

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