Wednesday briefing: How misinformation and a hardened immigration policy turned Ceuta into Europe’s latest flashpoint
The Guardian – World
theguardian.com
Summary
In today’s newsletter: The past week shows how quickly images, rumours and right-wing political opportunism can eclipse the facts on the ground Good morning. It’s a pattern that has become familiar since the 2015 refugee crisis. Ceuta | Hundreds of people have gathered in the northern Moroccan town of Fnideq, near the border with Spain’s Ceuta, flashing photos of their missing loved ones to passersby in the hope of tracking them down. Many of them swam around the border fence. A social media hoax, which hinged on a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily deported, seems to have played a pivotal role in encouraging the crossings. Instagram posts suggested Spain’s border with Morocco was opening up, TikTok videos showed people where to swim, and Facebook users began tracking coast guard patrols. As the hoax spread, Moroccan border surveillance dwindled to a minimum, allowing thousands of people to cross into Ceuta. Some analysts have suggested that Rabat, Morocco’s administrative capital, deliberately opened the border to protest Pedro Sánchez’s recent visit to Algeria (Morocco has a territorial dispute with the country). The EU has increasingly outsourced (“externalised,” in the policy lingo) border policing to non-EU countries, which have the power to loosen their borders whenever they choose. By Monday afternoon, Farage had alighted on a new policy that would use the Royal Navy to “stop the boats once and for all”.
From the source
In today’s newsletter: The past week shows how quickly images, rumours and right-wing political opportunism can eclipse the facts on the ground Good morning. Last week, an estimated 72,000 migrants began crossing into a tiny Spanish enclave on the tip of Morocco. Within 24 hours, most of them had headed home . At least 88 people died after attempting the crossing, according to local officials. This isn’t the whole story of what happened over the last week, but the facts are worth remembering. At an emergency meeting yesterday, EU interior ministers sought to draw a line under Ceuta, insisting that the passport-free Schengen area had never been at risk from the arrival of migrants at this scale. Despite this, much of the media coverage has suggested that events in Ceuta represent a territorial threat to Europe, sparking calls for greater security across the region’s borders. Environment | Eight of the biggest oil companies amassed profits of more than $90bn (£67bn) in just three months
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Published by The Guardian – World on theguardian.com
