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Immigration - in brief (4)

01 March 2000

Spain: Legal Network 2000 created: Several Spanish NGOs have come together to create Red Juridica 2000 (Legal Network 2000), which aims to stop the exploitation of immigrants by corrupt state agencies. They say that people have charged up to half a million pesetas for submitting regularisation forms, 230,000 pesetas for a passport or 5,000 pesetas for an official stamp. The main objective of the network is to provide a professional service free of charge to benefit participants in the migration process.

Spain: crossing the Strait: Late last year, several hundred immigrants left in dinghies from the northern coast of Africa for the Canary Islands. Among those were Moroccan dissidents from the Western Sahara provinces (who are fighting for independence from Morocco). Police sources say that the number of detentions along the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1999 was around 2,500 persons in over 300 dinghies. The death count has also increased with over 100 fatalities in 1999, according to the Asociacion Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucia (Andalusian Association for Human Rights). The government continues "sealing" the Strait and has allocated another one thousand million pesetas for this in this year's budgets (see Statewatch vol 9 no 3 & 4).

Ceuta: border wall completed: The barbed wire border "wall", built to stop migrants entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in north Africa, has been completed after seven years of work and at a cost of over 8,000 million pesetas. The 8.3 kilometre long wall between Ceuta and Morocco was classified as a military secret and is equipped with the latest high-technology devices including closed-circuit television, spotlights and sensory pads to detect migrants. In recent years the Moroccan authorities have been cooperating with Spain in the repatriation of immigrants under the Spain-Morocco Readmission Agreement (see Statewatch vol 5 no 6, vol 7 no 6).<