The right to asylum is a human right - not a privilege!
Refugees against the Schily's racist proposals
20.Sep.01 - We the refugees in Germany have no option than to call for an urgent,
determined and uncompromising action to defend the very right to asylum
in Germany.
For us it is clear that the proposals of Minister Schily is designed to
remove the substance and content of the right to asylum in Germany, to
dramatically reduce our number, remove our human rights, our right to
political expression and our right to legal defence. Further, Minister
Schily wants to increase our already unbearable social isolation by
driving a wedge between refugees and migrants by clearly defining
political refugees as being of least value and therefore the most
unwanted.
Since he has come into office Minister Schily has already put such
pressure on refugees, that due to fear of deportation many of us have
had to leave Germany, economically the most powerful country in Europe,
to find safety in other countries. He now wants to put into motion a
fast track deportation machinery by effectively stopping our access to
the German legal system by limiting the maximum time period for the
asylum process to one year. He wants to stop us from having access to
the democratic freedom to protest that others in Germany take for
granted by terrorising us with the spectre of torture and execution at
the hands of the regimes we fled from. He even wants to have the
possibility to take away political asylum from the very small number of
us who have been granted it. He wants to put 270,000 of us who have
'duldung' (suspension of deportation) in massive 'open prison camps' to
add inhuman physical conditions to the psychological pressure of the
threat of deportation.
As refugees it is our task and duty to try to bring out the terrible
reality facing our brothers and sisters in the lands that we flee from.
We promote, at least in those sections of German society concerned in
human rights and justice, a more solidarity based approach to the
peoples of our home countries rather than crude relationship based on
economic exploitation promoted by the German government. The destruction
of political asylum destroys the this possibility, it silences the voice
of human solidarity.
We will not sit idly by and let the right for asylum be swept away by
those who have no regard for human rights. We cannot stand by while the
German Government and the regimes in the countries of origin are
measuring us for our coffins.
We the refugees have united amongst ourselves to launch a non remitting
struggle against the Schily proposals and to defend the right to asylum
and we call all those concerned with human rights, who are opposed to
racism and who are for the progress of humanity to support our quest.
Nationwide demonstration on Saturday, 29th of September 2001
Alexanderplatz, Berlin 12 am.
Monday 24-Saturday 29 of September: Refugees Week 2001
Humboldt University Berlin, daily from 9 am, contact: 0160-1052445