First change: 01.11.2023 – 14:48
Geneva (AFP) – The new US immigration control plan could violate basic human rights, warned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Wednesday.
“The right to seek asylum is a human right, regardless of where a person comes from, what their residence status is or how they got to the border,” Türk said in a statement.
The senior official stressed that these measures “violated the prohibition on collective expulsion and the principle of non-refoulement.”
Last week, US President Joe Biden announced a new immigration plan that makes people who arrive at the border illegally more likely to face immediate deportation and a five-year ban on entering US territory.
As part of the plan, Biden will allow entry of up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela as long as they have a financial sponsor in the country and arrive by plane to avoid overwhelming border patrols.
The US economy is heavily dependent on foreign workers and Biden, upon arriving at the White House, pledged to give sanctuary to asylum seekers and end his predecessor Donald Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policy.
Many migrants, seeking to escape poverty or violence in their home countries, take a perilous route to the United States.
In the current fiscal year, more than 800 people have drowned in the Rio Grande, which marks the border between the United States and Mexico, according to border officials quoted by US public radio NPR.
In November, arrests of migrants at the US-Mexico border reached a record 230,000 people.
The border issue is one of Biden’s greatest political weaknesses, a stumbling block on his road to re-election if he runs for a second term, as his advisers say he plans to do.
So far, Biden has kept a low profile when it comes to criticism from the opposition, but also from human rights organizations.
The international principle of non-refoulement guarantees that no one may be deported to a country where they could be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
© 2023 AFP