Ocean Viking: Predictable Fiasco
30th November 2022
The affair of the reception of the migrant boat Ocean Viking continues to rebound and appears more and more like a management disaster on the part of the French government—unfortunately, highly predictable. It is epigrammatic of all the dysfunctions of immigrant reception policy, both at the national and European levels.
The boat docked on Friday, November 10th, in the military port of Toulon. The procedure for receiving refugees was then set in motion, and the French authorities quickly lost control of the situation, with one scandal following another. The controversy first arose over the conditions under which the migrants were received—either too favourable or too undignified, depending on the criticism from one side of the political spectrum or the other.
But the main problem involved the actual processing of the asylum applications. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, while attempting to use the occasion to demonstrate governmental firmness on illegal immigration, produced the opposite results. The judicial institutions did not follow the watchword. After having been initially refused entry to the territory, 123 adults out of the 189 placed in the ‘waiting zone’—the reception centre especially set up for the occasion on the Giens peninsula—were released. The courts were unable to rule on their case due to the lack of sufficient magistrates. Lack of time and procedural flaws are among the reasons for the defective ‘firmness’ displayed in high places.
UPDATE: Ivorian-Italian MP Soumahoro Accused of Mistreatment of Migrants