Austria to seize refugees’ mobiles and demand cash

Asylum seekers will be forced to hand over their mobile phones and up to 840 euros ($1,040) in cash to the authorities, under measures approved by the Austrian cabinet on Wednesday.

Published: 18 April 2018 13:59 CEST

Austria to seize refugees' mobiles and demand cash

FPÖ chairman Heinz-Christian Strache (R) and then secretary Herbert Kickl unveil the party's posters reading "Islamification should be stopped" ahead of last year's election. Photo: AFP

The money will be put towards the costs of their applications, while authorities will examine whether geo-location data from refugees' phones match their accounts of how they arrived in the country.

If the applicant is found to have previously entered another European country where the so-called “Dublin regulation” is in force, they could be sent back there.

Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) said his aim was a “restrictive and enforceable law regarding the rights of foreigners” in order to end “abuse” of the asylum system.

The measures are due to be voted through by parliament in the next few weeks.

In last year's parliamentary election, a crackdown on immigration was one of the FPOe's key themes and was also adopted by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his centre-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP).

Austria received more than 150,000 asylum applications — almost 2 percent of its total population of 8.7 million — following the migration crisis of 2015.

'Intrusion into privacy'

The measures announced on Wednesday also mean that refugees will only be able to apply for Austrian citizenship after ten years, as opposed to six previously.

Deportations of asylum applicants convicted of crimes will also be speeded up.

Human rights pressure group SOS Mitmensch denounced the measures.

“When the last bit of cash is taken away from men, woman and children, who already have very little, it's debilitating for those concerned,” the group said, adding that the measures would make integration more difficult.

The seizure of mobile phone data would be a “serious intrusion into people's privacy”, it said, while the plan to make applying for citizenship harder was “political posturing” to conceal the fact that the process is already very difficult.

Last week Kickl said he would push EU colleagues to end the possibility of asylum applications being made in Europe. He wants a system where people can only apply for asylum in so-called “transit zones”, outside the EU's borders.

He previously caused controversy earlier this year by saying he wanted to “concentrate” asylum-seekers in certain places, employing a word widely associated with Nazi camps.

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.