‘Hate speech’: SVP cries censorship after YouTube blocks anti-refugee campaign video

Switzerland's largest party on Thursday accused Google of censorship after a campaign video, which demonised asylum seekers, was removed from YouTube less than two weeks before national elections.

Published: 11 October 2019 09:00 CEST

'Hate speech': SVP cries censorship after YouTube blocks anti-refugee campaign video

Photo: FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP

The Zurich chapter of the right-wing SVP, which produced the video, gave YouTube's parent company Google a deadline of Sunday to put it back online and condemned the company for intervening in Swiss politics.

“We can confirm that this video was blocked by YouTube in Switzerland for reasons of violating YouTube's hate speech policy,” Google spokeswoman Violeta Torres told AFP in an email.

But SVP-Zurich spokesman Martin Suter told AFP that “all statements in the film are sourced.”

Party supporters “do not understand why Google, an American corporation, is intervening in Swiss politics and is censoring a commercial,” he said, referring to messages the party has received on Facebook.

Backed by a menacing soundtrack, the video features a set of headlines that question the validity of asylum claims made by Eritreans and argues that Eritreans living in Switzerland are a drain on national resources.

Switzerland for years had an open-door policy for those fleeing Eritrea, where the authoritarian government has been accused of widespread rights violations including open-ended military conscription.

Previously, to qualify as a refugee upon arrival in Switzerland, Eritreans simply needed to say that they had left their country “illegally”.

But those rules were tightened following a 2017 court ruling, which found that not all Eritreans seeking asylum in Switzerland faced imminent threat in their home country.

Suter cited previous court rulings to claim that Eritreans, who currently make up the largest group of asylum seekers in Switzerland, are not “real refugees.”

Asked what the SVP would do if the video was not restored by Sunday, he told AFP the party would decide how to proceed on Monday.

“Personally, I assume that Google has made a mistake and that they blocked the video prematurely,” he said.

Switzerland holds national elections on October 20. The SVP currently holds the most seats in parliament, but recent polls indicate left-of-centre parties could make gains at the polls.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.