Reykjavík Grapevine - 18.05.2012, Qupperneq 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2012
The best of Icelandic design and
delicious hand made chocolate.
The oldest house in Reykjavík
holds many modern treasures.
Aðalstræti 10
Monday - Friday 9:00 - 20:00
Saturday 10:00 - 17:00
Sunday 12:00 - 17:00 i c e l a n d i c d e s i g n
Can you imagine they're still holing asylum seekers into FIT Hostel?
How very depressing.
Words
Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson
Photography
Julia Staples
Iceland | Refugees
ICELANd'S COURTS JAIL TEEN REFUGEES
Maybe Iceland is the best in the world at that too…
At the same time as Iceland’s
media revelled in its news
last week about Iceland being
on of “the best country in the
world for children,” it became
known that two Algerian boys,
aged 15 and 16, had been sen-
tenced to thirty days in prison
in Iceland. Their crime? Using
forged passports to travel to
Iceland in search of asylum.
The ruling has been criticised by
many, including UNICEF, which
stated that it violated the UN Con-
vention on the Rights of the Child,
as well as the Government Agency
for Child Protection, which noted
the systematic racism implied in
the ruling. “If these children had
been Icelandic, they would never
have been sentenced to prison for
forgery,” Agency Director Bragi
Guðbrandsson told the State
Broadcasting Service RÚV.
While this particular event
received attention due to the
boys’ youth, less attention has
been given to an obvious pat-
tern in the Icelandic state's way
of dealing with asylum seekers
who enter the country with illegal
documents, either in their search
for asylum in Iceland or on their
way to doing the same in another
country. Namely, despite the UN
Convention Relating to the Status
of Refugees (CRSR), which states
that refugees can be excluded
from penalties for forgery, the
State systematically finds refu-
gees guilty of forgery and sen-
tences them to prison.
A MISINTERPRETATION
When an asylum seeker is caught
entering the country with a forged
passport, two opposing conven-
tions meet. On the one hand,
Iceland's penal code states that
forgery is punishable by up to
eight years imprisonment and that
stronger penalties should be con-
sidered if the forged document
is used as an official paper. On
the other hand, the UN CRSR—
first agreed upon in Geneva in
July 1951—states that its member
states should not punish refugees
for illegally entering or staying in
the country if they come directly
from a country where their lives
or freedom have been threatened.
The wording, “directly from a
country” has, however, proven
problematic. As Hrefna Dögg
Gunnarsdóttir, a MA law student
who wrote her thesis on this par-
ticular paragraph of the conven-
tion and its relevance to Iceland,
pointed out in a radio interview on
station Rás 2 last week, it should
not be understood literally. If it
is interpreted literally, refugees
coming to Iceland can never fit
that description and are there-
fore never granted protection.
The literal meaning, as Hrefna
pointed out, would put all respon-
sibility on the states that share
borders with the country from
which a particular refugee origi-
nally escapes, and this would go
completely against the aim of the
convention, which is for member
states to share the responsibility.
Furthermore, many of those
fleeing wars, human rights viola-
tions, persecution and repression,
are simply not in a position to
acquire legal documents, as the
spokesperson for the UN Refugee
Agency's Regional Office for Bal-
tic and Nordic countries Hanne
Matiesen pointed out on an in-
terview with radio show Spegil-
linn on May 14. Requesting pass-
ports can in some cases further
endanger their lives, whereas in
other cases, Somalia for instance,
the legitimate authorities needed
to issue such documents do not
even exist.
A LAWYER BUT NO dEFENCE
Looking through the archive of
Icelandic court rulings, the Ice-
landic state's pattern of interpre-
tation is clear: an asylum seeker is
arrested by the border police and
is then—in most cases not more
than three or four days later—
brought to court, where he or she
“unambiguously acknowledges”
his or her violation. Then he or
she is sentenced to thirty days in
prison and typically fined roughly
100 thousand ISK to cover his or
her lawyer fee. According to the
rulings, the decision to imprison
them for thirty days is based on
case law—one that gets stronger
with each sentencing.
One of the names that fre-
quently pop up while reading
through the court rulings is Unnar
Steinn Bjarndal. A district lawyer
who works at the Keflavík-based
law firm LS Legal, he has repre-
sented asylum seekers in more
than twenty published forgery
cases since 2008. Among his past
clients in court are the two Alge-
rian boys, as well as Henry Turay—
a refugee from Sierra Leone who,
after being denied asylum in late
2009, went into hiding and has not
been heard from since early 2010.
Judging by the verdicts, actual
legal defence is just about absent
in these cases and the same ap-
plies in just about all other asylum
seekers' forgery cases, regardless
of the defence lawyer each time.
Unnar explained that, according
to laws on criminal proceedings,
further argumentation does not
take place if the defendant has
acknowledged their violation.
With regard to the UN emergency
rights, he told me that, “the courts
have heretofore not consented to
a defence of that type.”
A HARSH REALITY
In an interview with newspaper
Fréttatíminn on May 11, one of
the Algerian boys, Adam Aamer,
said that he had no idea what was
happening in court and he said
that his lawyer had told him to
answer “yes” to every question.
Seventeen-year-old Amin Naimi
from Afghanistan, who was also
represented by Unnar in April this
year, told Fréttatíminn: “The law-
yer did not explain anything to me.
He just told me that I would have
to sit in prison for thirty days, but
that I would only have to spend 15
[days] there because I am a for-
eigner. Nothing else. I first met
him the day before the trials and
spoke very briefly with him.”
Unnar confirmed that he usu-
ally does not have the chance to
speak with his clients until the
day of the trials when they have
already been interrogated by the
police and confessed to using a
forged passport. Even though any
conversations with the police, be-
fore a defence lawyer enters the
picture, are not supposed to have
any weight in the criminal case it-
self, Unnar admits that this has an
indirect impact. “It is, for instance,
hard for them make a complete
U-turn in their stand regarding
the charges if they have already,
during the case's earlier stages,
acknowledged the violation,” he
told me.
It seems that the cases of
Adam and Amin are not an excep-
tion, but part of a pattern that is
far from limited to the courts and
their unwillingness to consent to
international agreements. The de-
fence lawyers in these cases—who
according to the Codex Ethicus
for the Icelandic Bar Association,
should above all “promote justice
and prevent injustice” and “safe-
guard [their] client’s interests”—
seem to be equally as unwilling to
try out these international agree-
ments and instead advise their
clients to just say “yes.”
That is a harsh reality for peo-
ple, sometimes children, fleeing
poor and conflict-torn countries
as Sierra Leone, Congo and Nige-
ria, and recently war-torn coun-
tries like Libya, Iraq and Afghani-
stan. But it spares the courts all
complexity and gives the lawyer
an easy extra 100 thousand ISK.
Maybe Iceland is also the best
country in the world for that?
Fit hostel - Reykjanesbær
“Many of those f leeing wars, human rights viola-
tions, persecution and repression, are simply not
in a position to acquire legal documents”