There have been plenty of bad decisions taken by European politicians in the last few years. But few will cause as much misery as Angela Merkel’s refugee policy. Her decision to rip up the Dublin Convention and announce that any Syrian can claim asylum in Germany will lead to more people putting their hands in the lives of unscrupulous human traffickers as they try desperately to make it to Germany. This will, tragically, lead to more deaths.
In the magazine this week, I argue that Merkel’s policy is flawed on several levels. First, she has chosen to prioritise those Syrians who have already made it to Europe. These people are not in imminent fear of their lives unlike the millions of internally displaced people within Syria. It also ignores the plight of those in refugee camps on the Syrian border; the UNHCR say that they have a $795 million funding gap in their Syrian operation.
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