Persuasive Essay On Fences

In response to the current refugee crisis, many States in Europe have built or envisage to build walls or fences on their borders in an attempt to stem the continued flow of asylum seekers, and prevent them from gaining access to their territory. The decision recently taken by the Hungarian authorities to build a barbed-wire fence along the country’s Southern border has triggered a domino effect across Europe, leading many neighboring States, including Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Macedonia, to seal off their borders by raising fences and other barriers designed to prevent the entry of refugees. Other States, such as Austria and Slovakia, announced that they would shortly follow suit. The use of fences as a means of controlling migrant

From a moral perspective, on the one hand, because the necessity to avoid the fences built along the land borders forces refugees into more dangerous and more expensive routes, thus pushing them into the hands of smugglers and traffickers. From a legal perspective, on the other hand, although this is less evident. States generally argue that building fences is perfectly legal, since they have the right to control who enters their territory. It is true that in principle, States are free to decide their own border protection measures, and that the possibility to erect a border fence is not expressly ruled out by any international, European or other regional legal instrument. Arguably, however, an outright rejection at the frontier of potential asylum seekers would appear to be in breach of the rules of international refugee law and, in particular, the principle of non-refoulement, provided for in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. According to the principle of non-refoulement, States should not expel or return an individual to a country where “his life or freedom would be threatened”. Returning at the border fence people who would have applied for asylum if they had been given the chance to do so, without verifying whether they would have invoked protection against refoulement, is thus