28 March 2012
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Spain
Migrant lock-in evicted by police
An action by around 1,500 undocumented migrant workers and participants
from civil society, who staged a peaceful lock-in in Barcelona
Cathedral on the evening of Saturday 5 June 2004 after a demonstration
demanding their regularisation, was ended by a police raid. The
raid was carried out by the Guardia Urbana (Barcelona municipal
police) and Policia Nacional riot police in the early morning,
after they had cordoned off the premises at 4 a.m. and invited
the occupants to leave. Although the protestors had stated that
they would leave the church by 9 a.m., and the parish priest
had authorised the action, the police entered the Cathedral to
forcefully evict the participants after a long night of negotiations
and threats by high ranking officials from the Generalitat (Barcelona's
town council), according to a press statement issued following
the eviction by the Asamblea por la Regularización sin
Condiciones (ARC, Assembly for Unconditional Regularisation).
Representatives of the Spanish and Catalan regional government,
as well as from the UGT and CCOO trade unions, also tried to
convince the demonstrators to leave the church. The officials
reportedly threatened protestors with being arrested and tried
if they did not leave the premises.
The protest was aimed at establishing a dialogue with the national government over seven claims that its participants considered "urgent" and a "priority": these include unconditional regularisation of migrant workers; that nobody should lose their rights as a result of the [public] administration's inefficiency [see below]; the annulling of expulsion orders that have not been executed, and putting an end to expulsions; putting an end to police harassment; closing detention centres; derogating the Ley de Extranjería (Spain's immigration law); and a substantial change in Spain's migration policy. Demonstrators who went outside the Cathedral to support the migrants during the eviction were allegedly charged and tear-gassed by police, and police charged and dispersed a later demonstration outside a second church (Iglesia del Pi) where another simultaneous lock-in by around 200 people was held, which ended before 9 a.m. on Sunday morning without intervention by the police. The ARC press statement alleges that some of the people who staged the lock-in were injured as they were cleared by police and several migrants were taken to La Verneda detention centre in Barcelona. These allegations were confirmed by subsequent reports in Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia indicating that 25 participants in the lock-in were detained and proceedings to issue them with expulsion orders are under way. ARC spokesman Enrique Mosquera described the opening of expulsion proceedings against these migrants as "atrocious", claiming that the police had "assured that the migrants would not be identified, and nor would they have any problems relating to the immigration law".
Joan Rangel, the government envoy in Cataunya, said that "Those
asking for papers for everyone are tricking people. Neither Spain
nor any country in the EU would ever approve this policy",
claiming that migrants are being "manipulated and used"
by "certain organisations", and that "while migration
should never be a public order concern, some people provoke this
kind of situation and then have the shamelessness to condemn
it". Zapatero, the Spanish PM, ruled out the possibility
of "papers for all", or even for an extraordinary regularisation,
arguing that the issue of migration needs to be organised better
through "legal immigration", whereas an extraordinary
regularisation may encourage an increase in illegal entries in
the future. Reports in El País newspaper indicate that
a backlog in administrative decisions is affecting 374,749 migrants,
mainly concerning the renewal of their work and residence permits,
which are experiencing delays of up to nine months. This situation
is particularly evident in Barcelona, where decisions on the
situation of 45,860 (on 28 April 2004) migrants are unresolved.
This situation places many migrants who were in a regular situation
in the past, to suffer a series of difficulties as result of
their inability to submit valid documents in a variety of fields,
such as opening bank accounts, obtaining services from the health
and social services, or travelling to their countries of origin
during holidays.
Similar actions by migrants who staged lock-ins in ten churches
in Barcelona in January 2001, which lasted up to 47 days, resulted
in the Partido Popular opening an extraordinary regularisation
process, resulting in around 14,000 migrants in the province
of Barcelona obtaining residence permits, although the majority
of applications were denied. Ecuadorians also locked themselves
up in churches in early 2001, after the PP government responded
to the death of twelve "illegal" Ecuadorian migrant
workers who died in a van which was run over by a train, as they
travelled down a secondary road to avoid police road-checks,
by promising a crackdown on employers who employed "illegal"
migrants, thus making large numbers unemployable (see Statewatch
vol. 11 no. 1). A two-month lock-in by migrants calling for their
regularisation in Pablo de Olavide university in Seville (Andalusia)
which started in June 2002, ended in a police raid to evict the
occupants several of whom were subsequently expelled (see Statewatch
vol. 12 no. 5, and Statewatch news online, August 2002).
Sources: El País 5-8.6.2004; La Vanguardia, 8.6.2004;
Press statement, Asamblea por la Regularización Sin Condiciones,
6.6.2004; Statewatch vols. 11 no. 1 & vol. 12 no. 5; Statewatch
news online, August 2002.
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