CHRONOLOGY

This chronology seeks to make it easier to understand European migration and asylum policies through a time-framed comparison of the evolution of the legal framework (columns A1 to A3), the public discourse (B1) and the facts (B2). The table is updated twice a year.

The aim is to picture the way in which the EU policy of closing the borders, apart from the sequence of tragedies that it causes, leads to human rights violations and to absurd situations that are sometimes impossible to manage by the very people who implement them, in an escalation whose effects sometimes appear to escape the grasp of its protagonists, and bargaining among states in which migrants, refugees and displaced people represent a form of exchange currency.

The prospects of this process are the unfair detention, repression and wandering of a growing number of would-be migrants. The chronology suggests that, should this trend continue to prevail in the future, we are heading towards a system enforcing the assignment of compulsory places of residence for third-country nationals, that is, a new version of apartheid on a worldwide scale in which camps will be in charge of keeping at a distance populations that have been rejected on both sides.

Last update 10 february 2014