Pushbacks from refugees: lip service instead of human rights

Refugees are pushed back at EU borders with batons – for Georg Restle another example of the EU’s failure to protect fundamental rights. He can no longer hear lip service from the truthfulness of these values.

These pictures take your breath away: people who are beaten like cattle from the EU – by police officers of a member state of the European Union. It’s called “protecting the EU’s external border” – and there’s money for it from Brussels and Berlin. And a lot of lip service: the high song of human rights and European values. You can’t hear it anymore!

Europe is abandoning those politically persecuted in Afghanistan. Europe drowns people in the Mediterranean and vegetates refugees in Greece – and beats them in Croatia and elsewhere with batons from the EU.

A departure from everything that should be Europe

Actually, the politically responsible should be ashamed of themselves in the face of this uninhibited inhumanity, the systematic human rights violations, the turning away from everything that should really make Europe.

But they pretend none of this is going to happen. “We are a European family. We share the same story, we share the same values, “said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – at the EU’s Western Balkans Summit, of all places.

“Where are the human rights in Europe?”

But which values ​​are actually still meant? The right to physical integrity, the rule of law, human dignity? The elementary, the essential human rights: In the forests of Croatia – and not only there – people are beaten out of their bodies.

A young refugee from Afghanistan said a sentence that should hurt us all:

Europe preaches human rights – and is concerned about what the Taliban are doing to the people of Afghanistan. But where are these human rights here in Europe?

One would really like to know. Incidentally, also from those in Germany who are currently setting up to form a new government.