‘Democrazia occidentale a rischio senza riforma asilo’

*Hans-Jürgen Papier’s opinions on the issue carry significant weight because he was the president of Germany’s constitutional court from 2002-10, at the start of the Merkel era, and has spent more than half a century working on questions of national sovereignty and the legitimacy of democratic institutions.*

*He argued that the current batch of planned reforms to the European Union’s asylum rules, which include measures to harden the bloc’s outer borders and to redistribute migrants between the member states, would fall far short of restoring the public’s faith in the state.*

*Papier, 82, who is now emeritus professor of public law at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, said the core of the problem was an “ever deeper reaching and ever more closely meshed agglomeration” of asylum rulings from national courts and the ECHR in Strasbourg.* 

*These now seemed to “settle like mildew over the states’ political power to take action”, he said. In Papier’s view, they have widened the right to asylum into a “de facto right to immigration through the back door”.* 

*He said: “The prospect that those in positions of political responsibility in Europe could change this system and adapt it to the fundamental changes in our social, political and cultural conditions seems ever more difficult and ever more hopeless to many people.*

*“The citizens expect those with political responsibility to revise the asylum policies to suit the changed circumstances. But that is in danger of failing because of the ossification of a body of law that is getting increasingly rarefied and ultimately looks irreversible to many politicians.”*

*Papier said this predicament was “generally destroying the European citizen’s trust in the capacity of their democratic institutions to act, and so at the end of the day endangering the existence of western democracies”.*

What democracy?

Citizens in “Western Democracies” (EU, UK, etc.) were never consulted or had their voices listened to on migration and the acceptance of asylum seekers.

Each time people spoke up, they were shouted down and silenced, so I don’t think they care much about democracy, or even the perception of it.

Social media is the bigger threat to democracy and everyone knows it.

With climate change happening effecting more and more people in Africa and central Asia. There are going to need to be hard decisions made on a global level.

Are we as a species just going to let billions die off and build a big glass dome around Western Europe or are we going to address root cause of the problem.

No one is getting on a raft and crossing the Mediterranean for the craic.

It’s a Big complex problem. It needs a big complex solution.