THE GOVERNMENT of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) on Tuesday presented its bill to counter instrumentalised immigration to the Finnish Parliament.
The heavily criticised bill – dubbed as a refoulement act by critics – would enable the government, in co-operation with the president, to temporarily suspend the reception of applications for international protection at or in the immediate vicinity of Finnish borders.
Its purpose is to discourage foreign states from leveraging migrants to cause unrest in and exert pressure on Finland, specifically by directing large numbers of migrants to the border in a bid to overwhelm the asylum and border control systems.
This is to be achieved primarily by preventing migrants from entering the country in the first place with physical obstacles such as fences, signs and verbal orders. Migrants who manage to enter the country, though, could also be removed if they are deemed to not need international protection by an individual border guard.
“An application for international protection can be received also if factors have emerged or been presented by [the applicant] that make it obvious, in the assessment of a border guard, that the person would be under a genuine threat of the death penalty, torture or other treatment violating human dignity in the country from which they entered Finland,” the bill reads.
The assessment would be made based on documents presented by the applicant, discernible external factors and up-to-date information from “various sources” on the safety of the country in question.
Officials at the Finnish Border Guard levelled exceptional criticism at the first draft of the bill, viewing that it could force border guards to violate their official duty and thus expose themselves to criminal charges given the conflict between it and the foundations of the forms of state, constitutional order and rule-of-law principles.
In an apparent response to the criticism, the government assured that border guards would receive training and instructions that enable them to identify genuinely vulnerable people.
“The assessment would in practice be carried out by a border guard who has received sufficient training and instructions on the matter. The summary assessment would be based on sufficient interaction that provides the person seeking entry with a genuine opportunity to raise issues that are relevant to the assessment. The case-by-case assessments would invariably be made without delay,” the revised bill states.
Interaction between the applicant and border guard would be facilitated by means of phone interpretation, for example.
Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Pöysti on Tuesday stated that although the basic provisions of the bill continue to pose a risk of violations of rights and international human rights treaties, he did not detect any legal obstacles for presenting it to parliament. The government, he added, has “partly taken into account” the observations he made in his provisional review as it continued to draft the provisions and justifications.
Helsingin Sanomat on Tuesday wrote that the key legal issue in the amended bill remains the lack of a legal protection mechanism, namely the fact that migrants removed from the country would have no right to appeal the removal to a court because the removal is not considered an administrative decision.
Pöysti in his provisional review demanded that the government either consider instituting a separate appeal or rectification procedure, or provide justification for the lack of such a procedure.
The government adopted the latter approach, stating in the revised bill that migrants “cannot seek to overturn a removal decision by means of appeal”.
The bill also states that migrants who are removed from the country must be notified of the grounds of the decision in written form and provided information on where they can submit an application for international protection.
YLE on Tuesday reported that legal experts remain concerned about the bill.
“I’m surprised that the bill will be presented to parliament in its current form,” Martti Koskenniemi, a professor emeritus of international law at the University of Turku, stated to the public broadcasting company.
While the government has acknowledged that the bill is in tension with human rights, Koskenniemi rejected the characterisation, arguing that the bill “is not in tension with” but “unequivocally violates” international human rights.
He also viewed that the delegation of decision-making powers to individual border guards is a central practical issue with the bill. “If I was a border officer, there’s no way I’d agree to make such an assessment.”
The bill has divided opinion also within both the ruling and opposition parties.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
