‘Finland kills with a pen’ – asylum seekers’ protest against bureaucratic violence as politics of human rights

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the literature on non-citizens’ protests by analysing asylum seekers’ claims to right to life as a case of politics of human rights. By analysing asylum seekers’ protests as making visible the structural and bureaucratic violence of the state that violates their fundamental human rights, this article offers a reading of non-citizen protests as an engagement in the politics of human rights. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Right to Live protest in Finland, I discern the modalities of the injuries experienced by asylum seekers and their critique of the state. Their critique focuses on the bureaucratic violence of rendering asylum seekers illegal and the threat of deportation, as well as the violence of an arbitrary state expressed in legislative changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Bureaucratic violence
• structural violence
• asylum seekers’ protests
• politics of human rights
• human rights
• refugee protests

Introduction

‘We are here to show that we are humans just like anyone else’ is how 23-year old Fahim,¹ an Afghan asylum seeker, explained to me the reason for why he and a hundred of other Afghani and Iraqi asylum seekers had been involved in a protest entitled ‘Right to Live’ in the centre of Helsinki, Finland, in spring 2017. The asylum seekers were protesting against the tightening asylum regime and deportations that they claimed were fringing upon the principle of non-refoulement. Fahim’s statement resonates with a great deal of research on non-citizens’ protests that has demonstrated asylum seekers’ claims for a shared humanity going beyond the exclusionary logic of formal citizenship (see, for example, Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016; McNevin 2013; Nyers 2015; Tyler and Marciniak 2013). This research has focused on the ambivalence, discussed already by Arendt (1968), that the demand for the recognition of universal human rights can only be posed to a nation-state that can guarantee those rights – ambivalence that Arendt formulated as the ‘right to have rights’. However, if the human rights claims made by asylum seekers are taken seriously, we need an alternative frame to understand the political struggles that are situated within the context of a nation-state, but make claims reaching beyond the frame of the national constitutional state. We need an alternative formulation of politics and rights that goes beyond the struggle for the right to have rights (Ingram 2008). I argue that Rancière’s (2004) notion of human rights politics is useful here. According to Rancière (2004) and Balibar (1994), Arendt’s notion of the ‘right to have rights’ in fact signifies a right to politics. Human rights are thus instrumental for politicization: human rights become political when they are denied and when this denial is contested (Rancière 2004). Empirically, this means considering the importance of development in fundamental and human rights legislation, and the role that supranational legal instruments – especially the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) – have had in giving individuals, including non-citizens, a basis for human rights claims. The ECHR is ratified by 47 Council of Europe countries and its implementation is safeguarded by the ECtHR.

In this article, I examine how asylum seekers, using their experiences of the structural and bureaucratic violence they have encountered, make claims based on human and fundamental rights. Accordingly, this article contributes to the existing literature by offering a reading of the claims made at the Right to Live protest from the perspective of politics of human rights that reveals the nation-state’s structural (Galtung 1969) and bureaucratic violence (see also Beaugrand 2011; Gunneflo 2012; Spade 2011; Tyner and Rice 2015). Asylum seekers’ protests can be understood as collective acts ‘against the exclusionary technologies of citizenship, which aim to make visible the violence of citizenship as regimes of control’ (Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 146, emphasis in the original). I aim to discern the modality of the injuries experienced by asylum seekers as a form of structural and bureaucratic violence. By making their injuries visible, asylum seekers are demonstrating that their human rights have been transgressed. In what follows, I first present the Right to Live protest and situate it in the theoretical debates on bureaucratic violence. I then discuss the ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted and present an empirical analysis, which is followed by my conclusions.

Asylum seekers’ Right to Live protest in Helsinki

The Right to Live protest took place in a particular political climate in the aftermath of the so-called asylum ‘crisis’ or ‘long summer of migration’ (Kasparek and Speer 2015) when an unprecedented number of asylum seekers arrived in Germany, Austria and other Northern European countries, following the temporary opening of borders on the so-called Western Balkan route. The alarmist way of addressing refugees’ legal right to seek asylum in Europe as a ‘crisis’ stigmatises migrants and is politically intentional (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, and Wodak 2018, 3). The alarmism created a political space in which special arrangements became possible, such as erecting border controls between Denmark and Sweden, ending the era of free travel in the Nordic countries that had been in force since 1945. This demonstrated how quickly states were willing to erect border controls without political debate. Evidently, such reactions did not emerge from nowhere: the criminalisation and securitisation of asylum, a global preoccupation with border ‘security’, and the emergence of a deportation regime is a longer, post-September 11 development (De Genova and Peutz 2010). Irregular migrants have long been presented in the political discourse as ‘illegal immigrants’ (Schuster 2011; Tyler 2006), and unwanted migratory mobilities have been referred to with metaphors related to water (‘flood’, ‘drowning’) that underline the uncontrollability of migration and its threat to the nation-state. Yet, the reactions to the long summer of migration were more complex and not only negative. From 2015, massive solidarity and support activities by lay people emerged – activities that have been referred to in research by the buzzword ‘Welcome culture’ (Hamann and Karakayali 2016). Furthermore, a new wave of support for anti-immigrant populist parties ensued and the anti-immigration politics were also mainstreamed into the political agendas of liberal and centre-leftist parties. Importantly, in the aftermath of the crisis, asylum seekers were also mobilised against deportations and the erosion of their legal rights in contexts where this had not previously occurred on a large-scale, such as the Right to Live protest in Helsinki, Finland.

The Right to Live protest is the second longest demonstration to be held in Finland and the first wide-scale political protest by non-citizens.² It was started by Iraqi and Afghani asylum seekers who had arrived in Finland in autumn 2015 and their Finnish supporters, many of whom had been activists in the Free Movement–network.³ The protest involved around 100 activists, but was seen and visited daily by hundreds of passers-by. The protest began in front of Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art, on 10 February 2017 and was moved by police order to the Helsinki Railway Square. At the Railway Square, the protest lasted, around the clock, until the end of June, when the police – on the grounds of possible safety risks relating to the Helsinki Pride March – ordered the protest to be removed. After a break of one week, the demonstration continued in front of Kiasma, but on the condition that it was only active during the daytime. The struggle over the place of the protest demonstrates the importance of visibility for protest camps (Ataç 2016). The protest was reactivated at the beginning of September, when the asylum seekers, with the help of a Taiwanese architect, built a Right to Live House as part of Helsinki Design Week. The Right to Live House lasted for two weeks, after which the physical, long-term form of the Right to Live protest ended.

The Right to Live protest was, in many ways, an exceptional protest in Finland, as it led to both support and counter-demonstrations. In support of the demonstration at the Helsinki Railway Square, an almost two-month-long asylum seeker protest was also held in the city of Oulu, northern Finland, from March to April. Both the Helsinki and Oulu demonstrations were protested against by counter-demonstrations. The Helsinki counter-demonstration called itself Suomi Maidan, and was within sight of the Right to Live protest for almost as long as the asylum seekers’ protest.⁴ The counter-demonstrators involved acts of harassment and violence against the asylum seekers’ protests. Both the Helsinki and Oulu support protesters were attacked with Molotov cocktails. In Helsinki, an Iraqi man severely burnt his hands while putting out a fire lit by a Molotov cocktail.

The protesters’ demands were summarized into five concrete points aimed at various political representatives of the state, as well as the Finnish Immigration Service (in future, Migri). The demands were translated into different languages and handed out to passers-by and politicians who visited the demonstration. The demands concerned the right to legal help in the asylum process, which had been limited by an amendment to the Aliens Act in 2016 stating that adult asylum seekers no longer had the right to free legal counsel during the asylum interview ‘unless the presence of an assistant is necessary for extremely pressing reasons’. The protesters demanded rectifications to decisions put forth by Migri that were deemed to have been made by inexperienced personnel aided by incompetent interpreters, or were based on outdated country safety reports. The demands called for the suspension of deportations until the validity of the decisions were guaranteed and sufficient accommodations and livelihoods were secured for people whose reception services had ended. Justifying the demands was a collective sense of injustice, especially due to the changing bureaucratic practices in Migri that occurred after autumn 2015, which led to an increasing number of negative decisions, especially concerning the legislation of the Aliens Act.

Situating the Right to Live protest as human rights politics

While the collective mobilisation of asylum seekers is new in Finland, it can be understood as part of the global political movement campaigning for migrants’ rights, which has been active in Central Europe and the United States since the 1970s, and in the Nordic countries since the 2010s (Bendixsen 2017; Chimienti 2011; Maestri and Hughes 2017; Nordling, Sager, and Söderman 2017; Tyler and Marciniak 2013). Research on migrant activism (e.g. Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016; Tyler and Marciniak 2013; Nyers and Rygiel 2012) has analysed migrants’ ‘acts of citizenship’, such as contesting deeds that create new claims and enact new rights, through which political subjectivities are acquired (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Research has demonstrated that in asylum seekers’ acts of citizenship, political claims are made based on shared humanity, on being humans who have rights for the sake of being in the world (Caraus 2018, 804) – as ‘citizens already’ (Bojadžijev and Karakayali 2010) – rather than for the sake of claiming that they belong as future citizens of a particular nation-state. Citizenship is thus coexistent with borders and the exercise of sovereign control (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009), based on the differential inclusion and exclusion of migrants (Bosniak 2006; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). As argued by Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013, 183), liberal citizenship not only excludes those who are outside its borders, but it can actively ‘denationalise’ dangerous or unwelcomed citizens, or even create accidental categories of citizenship (Nyers 2006).

Simultaneously, existing research has discussed that such claims based on shared humanity, reflected also in Fahim’s statement presented in the introduction, brings forth the paradoxes inherent in asylum seekers’ activism – namely that migrants’ activism simultaneously contests the exclusiveness of citizenship as a means for inclusion in the political sphere, while being dependent on the same logic (Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016; McNevin 2013; Tyler 2006; Tyler and Marciniak 2013). The demand for the right to live appeals to equal and inseparable human and basic rights, but the demand can only be made to the nation-state, which is the authority that ultimately guarantees these rights (Arendt 1968). Arendt’s claim is often simplified with the argument that only a nation-state can provide an individual the right to have rights. However, as discussed by Ingram (2008), Rancière’s (2004) and Balibar’s (1994) critique of Arendt offers a means to develop politics of human rights that can go beyond constitutional frameworks and account for how human rights can be politicised. Rather than perceiving human rights in existential terms, as Arendt seems to suggest, human rights can be understood as strategic (Schaap 2011). Rancière (2004, 302) argues that human rights ‘are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights they have not’. Thus, human rights emerge through political action when they are enacted by political subjects that ‘demonstrate the reality of both their equality […] and their inequality within the social order’ (Schaap 2011, 34, emphasis in the original).

A great deal of the existing research has focused on claims made by non-citizens and undocumented migrants based on the fact that they are present in a territory even though they do not have access to legal rights. This article aims to add a further dimension to this discussion by arguing that non-citizens also make human rights claims by making the structural and bureaucratic violence of the nation-state visible. Thus, in order to claim their ‘right to life’, asylum-seeker activists argued both that their home countries were not safe and that their human rights in Finland were violated due to the structural and bureaucratic violence they encountered. Galtung’s notion of structural violence – violence which is ‘built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (Galtung 1969, 171) – is useful in the analysis of the claims Right to Live activists were making. Galtung’s work is important, in that he proposes an extended concept of violence – ‘violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realization’ (168) – in situations in which harm could be avoided. Galtung’s concept of structural violence should be understood as a process rather than a system or a structure, as proposed by Confortini (2006). One specific instance in which structural violence manifests itself is in bureaucratic processes that have violent outcomes. I suggest the notion of ‘bureaucratic violence’ to refer to the violent outcomes of bureaucratic processes. Bureaucratic violence influences human beings in ways that prevent them from actualising their potential in situations in which violent outcomes could be avoided.

Bureaucratic violence, as a concept, grasps the often arbitrary and impenetrable Kafka-esque processes of migration and asylum regimes better than the notion of ‘administrative’ violence. Bureaucracy, as Weber (1978, 987) reminds us, is an ‘instrument of rationally organising authority relations’, a power instrument that ‘is among those social structures, which are the hardest to destroy’. I propose that bureaucratic violence as broader term than suggested in earlier literature in which it has been used to refer to ‘rights deprivation’, such as the denial of identification papers (Beaugrand 2011). Similarly to Tyner and Rice (2015), who discuss the administrative violence inherent in the agricultural policies of the Khmer Rouge of Kampuchea that led to widespread famine, I perceive bureaucratic violence as the violent outcomes of the bureaucratic practices of migration and asylum regimes. Asylum seekers’ protests make visible the violence inherent in the asylum regime, and through this critique, they are able to make human- and fundamental rights–based claims to the Finnish nation-state, due the fact that Finland should follow supranational human rights legislation.

Hence, I argue that the development of fundamental and human rights legislation and that supranational legislative bodies, such as the ECtHR, offer non-citizens arenas in which to enact their human rights politics and to demonstrate both their equality as humans, as well as their inequality within the social order. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 3 states that everyone has ‘the right to life, liberty and the security of person’, article 2 in the ECHR goes further and states that ‘Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law’. The ECHR thus obliges that the 47 states that have ratified the ECHR protect individuals’ lives under national legislation. Moreover, the establishment of the ECtHR in 1959, as a living legal instrument whose rulings legally bind countries, provides a forum for people to have their cases heard if they believe their rights have been denied. Moreover, the principles in the ECHR have also been incorporated into domestic legislation and constitutions. For instance, in 1998, the ECHR was incorporated into the UK legislation through the passing of the Human Rights Act, and in 1999 it was incorporated into the Finnish Constitution.

Reflexive ethnography as a method

This article is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork I carried out during the demonstration of the asylum seekers from the beginning of March to September 2017. During my fieldwork, I conducted participant observation at the Right to Live demonstration held at the Helsinki Railway Square and Kiasma, as well as in the ensuing events and smaller protests. I interviewed the activists participating in the demonstration and conducted participant observations at the physical sites of the protest.

Following activists to their homes and reception centres, I visited three different reception centres in southern Finland. Following activists who were taken into detention for deportation, I visited both detention centres in Finland: in Metsälä, Helsinki and Joutseno, near the Russian border. I interviewed 41 asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of these interviewees, 31 were men and 10 were women, and at the time of the interviews, they were all between 20 and 55 years old. The gender division reflects the overall gender composition of the asylum seekers from these groups. Most of the interviews were conducted face-to-face in English, and in six of the interviews a friend of the interviewed person who spoke more fluent English acted as an interpreter. One interview was conducted in Finnish, and when possible, follow-up interviews were conducted. I also interviewed ten Finnish supporters of the protest. I followed social media discussions by activists and the organisation of the protest via chat discussions. I attended the general meetings in which issues around the protest were decided, as well as meetings with the police.

Reflexivity has been my guideline for conducting my research throughout the entire process. I understand reflexivity as a central method, which turns research ethics into ethical research practices (Guillemin and Gillam 2004). This means, for instance, being sensitive to the interview situation and interpreting signals given by asylum seekers indicating their discomfort, anxiety and distrust. It also means reflecting on the ethical issues related to the research methods themselves. The interview method is not a neutral form of gathering information; it can be perceived as a Western method, based on an individualistic view of the subject, who is used to talking about him or herself according to a linear concept of time, relatively realistically. During an interview, the researcher gives the interviewee categories that are not neutral, but contribute to forming the field to be studied and the position of the study participant in the field (Näre and Holley2015). For the asylum seeker, the interview situation in itself reminds them, through its format, of an asylum interview, which is liable to create distrust towards the interview and its purpose. Many interviewees also had negative experiences with the interpreters during asylum interviews. For this reason, I did not want to employ separate interpreters, but tried to interview those who had a sufficient level of English. In cases in which the language level was insufficient, the interpreter was someone familiar to the interviewee. Many interviewees expressed their gratitude for being allowed to tell their own story in a way they considered ‘free’. In the interviews, I strived to pay attention to the emotions and reactions of the interviewee. This kind of micro-ethical (Guillemin and Gillam 2004) reflection was also part of my observations. The interviewees whose interviews were recorded received information on the study in Dari and Arabic, which explained the ethical principles of the research in terms of the use and storage of the study data and the principle of anonymization. They also signed Arabic and Dari versions of the informed consent form.

Reflexivity also determined the data analysis. The analysis progressed at different intensities during different stages of the study. Although analysis cannot be completely separated from data collection, I consciously aimed to distance myself from the field and the research objective in order to be able to analyse the data. The analysis consisted of thematic organisation of the research interviews and field notes, and close-readings vis-à-vis theoretical and research literature.

Asylum seekers’ critique of bureaucratic violence

A central demand of the Right to Live protest targeted the state, which, from one moment to the next, renders people without residence permits as ‘illegal’ (Schuster 2011). For the time that the asylum application is being processed, the asylum seeker is partially included in the state: he or she has access to reception services, which include basic means of support, basic healthcare services and the right to work. When the asylum seeker receives his or her ‘second negative’ – the decision of the first appeal from the Administrative Court – access to reception services ends, unless the asylum seeker succeeds in submitting a new application for asylum on the grounds of new evidence or they are granted the rare opportunity to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland. After reception services have ended, municipal social services ought to provide basic services and emergency housing (only during the day) to the rejected asylum seekers. However, access to these services depends on the services available in the specific municipalities and also on access to interpreters that can translate the information of these services to asylum seekers.

In the protest, asylum seekers claimed that they have the right to life in Finland and also that their basic needs should be covered. In fact, the protest became a space that mitigated the effects of being deprived of basic services for rejected asylum seekers. It became a place in which one could find legal aid and information, as well as temporary accommodation when reception services had ended. On the first day of my fieldwork at the protest, I met a father of four children from Iraq who had received his second negative and had been kicked out of the reception centre. He came to the protest with his papers and was asking for activists speaking Arabic to explain to him why his case had been rejected. He showed me his documents, and via a young Iraqi activist, asked me to explain why he had been rejected. The document, entitled Notification of the End of Reception Services, stated the following:

Red Cross reception centre (NAME) has on DATE received from PLACE police department the notification that your case regarding international protection has been adjudicated and the decision of your expulsion from the country is enforceable, but it cannot be enforced by the authorities. There are no grounds for your stay in Finland, so you will be given reception services only 30 days after the notification from the police, unless you apply for the support for the voluntary return. […] After the end of your reception services, you cannot live in the reception centre any more, nor you will receive any other reception services. If you don’t leave the reception centre voluntary within the time limit, the reception centre can call the police to remove you. […] As explained above, your reception services end by DATE. (Field notes 4 March 0017)

The above document summarises the violent effects of the so-called ‘deportation gap’ (Gibney 2008) or, the space created by the state that makes a person undocumented without being able to deport him or her. The above document includes a threat that reception services will end in a month’s time unless the asylum seeker agrees to return ‘voluntarily’ to their country of origin. The termination of reception services, the ‘system’ as the asylum seekers called it, was dreaded by all. It meant that the stability of bed and board, which the system provided, was transformed into ‘emergency’ services offered on a daily needs-assessed basis – they became emergency accommodations offered on a nightly basis and food provided by churches and other voluntary services.

For Nadim, a young Afghan asylum seeker, the violent outcomes of the asylum regime were too much to bear. After he had received his second negative, he came to the protest one evening in early March, fearing deportation and desperate after having received the notification that his reception services would end. He climbed up a tree at the Railway Square next to the protest with the intention of hanging himself. Fortunately, other activists noticed his actions and were able to get him down from the tree before he was able to harm himself. He was taken to an emergency hospital, from where he was released with a prescription for anti-depressants. Some days later, I met Nadim, who was still in a state of distress, but was now being looked after by his activist friends. He explained his actions as follows: ‘In Afghanistan the Taliban kills with guns; in Finland the government kills with pens’.

Nadim’s statement captures the bureaucratic violence he experienced in Finland. He is referring to the way in which his asylum case had been handled and his possible deportation to Afghanistan, where he was sure he would be killed by the Taliban. However, he was also referring to the actual letter he received from the reception centre, the statement that ended his reception services and made him homeless. In his desperation, he decided that hanging himself was a better option than being deported to Afghanistan or living on the streets. Nadim was not alone in this decision. According to news reports, 70 asylum seekers attempted suicide in reception centres from 2016 to early 2017, and a further five were successful (Mäntymaa 2017). The acts of self-harm that asylum seekers engaged in can be understood as acts of desperation, as well as acts of engaging in human rights politics that seek to make visible the effects of the bureaucratic and structural violence of the state. Similarly, Hirvonen (2019) has argued that by declaring that the right to life belonged equally to everyone, protesters at the Right to Live demonstration were evoking what Rancière calls le tort, or ‘the wrong’: ‘There is a wrong in the distribution of the sensible: forced deportation to death, terror and war, which is connected to exclusion from human and constitutional rights. This articulation of wrong made the demonstration into a political stage’ (Hirvonen 2019, 3). In summary, by making visible their suffering and the fact that deportation will endanger their lives, asylum seekers are not only enacting their right to have rights as political subjects, but also their right to have fundamental human rights – namely, their right to life.

Protest against an arbitrary state

In Finland, as in all countries, migration and asylum policies are executed and aligned through many different institutions. Finland has signed and ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, and it goes without saying that non-refoulement as jus cogens protecting the right to life is also incorporated into the Finnish Constitution. Tourist visas and the reception of family reunification applications are processed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ missions (embassies and affiliates of the Finnish embassies). Yet, the most important body regulating the citizenship institution in Finland is Migri, which grants residence permits to foreign nationals, handles citizenship applications and processes asylum applications from the asylum interview to the final decision. Migri is responsible for and has to comply with performance targets set by the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of the Interior directs the immigration policy in accordance with the guidelines laid down by the government. Migri steers and plans the reception of asylum seekers and decides on the closure of the reception centres. The Administrative Court and the Supreme Administrative Court process the appeals of the asylum applications. The border control authorities and the police make proposals for deportation; however, the final decision is made by Migri and deportation and detention are then enforced by the police. The practices concerning the deportation of a foreigner without a valid residence or travel document is expressed in a highly vague manner in the Aliens Act, giving the police a lot of discretionary power over the decision. Accordingly, a foreigner can be deported ‘if s/he may, for a valid reason, be suspected of acquiring income through dishonest means’, ‘s/he may, for a valid reason, be suspected of selling sexual services’ and ‘s/he may be suspected of committing an offense punishable by a term of imprisonment imposed in Finland or repeatedly suspected of having a criminal offense on the basis of a sentenced prison sentence or otherwise’. Thus, a foreigner does not need to be a criminal or a failed asylum seeker, merely being suspected of committing an offence is sufficient. As Könönen (2018) has demonstrated, for offenses that Finnish citizens would be merely fined, a foreigner might be deported.

Migration and asylum policies are not stable, but instead, are changing regularly. According to my calculations, by April 2019, the Aliens Act has been amended 78 times after it came into effect on 30 April 2004. In fact, in 2015, as many as 13 amendments were made to the Act. Although some of the amendments have been small and technical in comparison to amendments made to other acts, the Aliens Art has undergone over 50 significant changes to content, many of which come from EU directives. The Aliens Act is now a complex piece of legislation with 15 chapters and 215 articles, making the interpretation of the law surrounding it difficult.

A key amendment made to the Aliens Act in 2016 concerned an asylum seeker’s right to legal help during the asylum hearing and a decrease in the appeal time to the Administrative Court. The right for legal help was restricted, so that an adult asylum seeker no longer has the right to the presence of free legal aid counsel in the asylum interview ‘unless the presence of an assistant is necessary for extremely pressing reasons’. Free legal assistance was restricted to the appeal phase when the application was reviewed in the Administrative Court. Fees for legal assistant were changed into fixed remuneration instead of hourly based fees, which attracted in-experienced lawyers to the field who were looking for ‘easy’ opportunities to make money. The appeal time to the Administrative Court was shortened to 21 days and to merely 14 days for an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court, when the normal appeal times are 30 days. These legal changes were justified by the economic burden that asylum seekers brought to the Finnish state. After these legal changes, asylum seekers were no longer equal before the law in Finland.

The Right to Live protest brought the injustices of these legal changes and their effects on the lives of the asylum seekers to the attention of the wider public. The right for a fair asylum process was one of the demands of the protesters. Moreover, the protest created a space in which legal assistance was provided by lay people, and a number of Finnish activists started helping out with the cases and replaced the role of legal aids during the Migri hearings. The Right to Live protest chats were used to organise legal aid, but also the physical protest allowed for encounters such as the following:

I am chatting with Anne, a Finnish supporter. An Iraqi man comes to us and shows us his papers, his Migri decision written in Finnish and asks me and Anne to explain [to] him why he has received a negative decision. […] We read it through and while reading Anne asks me if I have read these before. She tells me: The same stuff keeps repeating. That everything is accepted, the police accept as fact that he is persecuted but he is denied a permit because Iraq is a safe country to return to and that the persecution is not personal […] Anne asks the man whether his lawyer is any good. He responds that it’s impossible to know. He doesn’t know what makes a good lawyer. (Field notes 24 March 2017)

The activists started to keep track of legal aids that were not considered competent and contacted lawyers to pressure them to help with the cases. The activists criticised lawyers who, in their mind, gave up on the asylum cases when their clients were detained for deportation. Some of the activists became experts on the deportation cases and started to take over the cases from the lawyers. When the asylum seekers were waiting for deportation, the activists collected new evidence, filed appeals to the Administrative Court for the suspension of the deportation, organised doctors to visit their clients in detention to assess whether the asylum seekers were healthy enough to be deported, filed new asylum appeals on behalf of their clients and managed to get several people out of detention – for some, the suspension of deportation came when the detainees were already sitting in the airplane.

In the above quote, Anne refers to one of the key claims made by The Right to Live protesters, namely that the quality of the decisions made by Migri were low and made by inexperienced staff. The protest and a blog called MigriLeaks, which started publishing asylum decisions, allowed activists to compare individual case files, find mistakes made by unqualified interpreters and criticise the quality of asylum decisions in general. The Right to Live protest gave asylum seekers a platform to criticize the Finnish asylum process collectively and individually. Research has highlighted the constant suspicion that defines the Finnish immigration policy (Fingerroos, Tapaninen, and Tiilikainen 2016), which Khosravi (2010), in relation to Sweden, calls a ‘culture of suspicion’. Akram, a young man from Afghanistan, was well aware of the effects of the amendments to the Aliens Act that had changed the rules of the game:

A: When we arrived in Finland, they gave us an instruction paper that we had to read and which told us the grounds on which asylum was granted. They said, ‘We will give you a negative or positive within six months’, and then there was humanitarian protection. And when we arrived in Finland and started to live in Finland, they [the government] changed the policy and removed the humanitarian protection from the law. And this is unfair, because lots of people don’t have a strong enough case and they could have had asylum on the basis of humanitarian protection, and they [the government] removed that article, so it means that they can’t get asylum, and this is unfair. (Akram’s interview 9 March 2017)

Akram is referring to the change made to the Aliens Act on 16 May 2016 according to which an asylum seeker could have been granted a permit based on humanitarian protection in cases in which the grounds for asylum or subsidiary protection were not fulfilled, but the person could not be deported to their country of origin due to war, natural disaster or other conflicts in the region of origin. The removal of humanitarian protection was linked to Migri’s new country reports that came out in May, 2016. Simultaneously, the demands for providing evidence for personal persecution became stricter. This resulted in the increase in negative decisions, especially for Iraqi asylum seekers. In 2015, the recognition rate for Iraqi asylum seekers was 84% in Finland, but dropped to only 23.5% in 2016 (Eurostat 2019). Migri explained that the reason for the drop in the recognition rate was due to the different profiles of applicants between these two periods. However, an analysis of asylum cases and decisions by legal scholars demonstrated that the profiles of the applicants did not differ from 2015 to 2016. What seemed to change was the way in which Migri interpreted evidence given by asylum seekers (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018). Although the principle of the Rule of Law is formally respected in asylum-seeking cases in Finland, the Aliens Act was not implemented in a human- and fundamental rights–oriented manner. Moreover, this study demonstrated that Migri did not follow the main principle of administrative law, mainly the principle of good governance, which can be found in the Finnish Constitution and in the Administrative Law.

Significantly, it was the asylum seekers’ protests that brought the question of the increase in negative decisions into public awareness. Khosravi (2010, 112) argues that the entire current ‘asylum process seems to be based on locating inconsistencies in the applicant’s story, so that the authenticity of the need for asylum can be questioned.’ In Finland, in addition to the culture of suspicion, the interpretation of what counts as ‘objective’ evidence changed in 2016, as a response to the increased number of asylum seekers. By bringing decisions to the protest, activists were able to compare different cases and started noticing that many decisions repeated the same sentences, as if they had been copy-pasted.

By printing quotes from the Finnish Constitution on the side of their tent, the protesters reminded passers-by of the principle of non-refoulement in three languages: Finnish, English and Swedish. Their claim that the rapid changes in asylum legislation and practices have infringed on the principle of non-refoulement was proven correct in November 2019 when ECtHR ruled that Finland had breached ECHR’s articles 2 (right to life) and 3 (prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment) in the case of a deported Iraqi man who was killed after his expulsion from Finland (Case of N.A. v. Finland 2019). In its judgement, ECtHR sided with the claimant, determining that the quality of assessment conducted by the Finnish authorities in Migri and in the Administrative Court and Supreme Administrative Court did not sufficiently account for the relevant facts and risks. Hence, the ‘Finnish authorities and courts failed to comply with their obligations under Articles 2 and/or 3 of the Convention when dealing with the applicant’s father’s asylum application’ (Case of N.A. v. Finland 2019, §85). The ruling also expands on the formulation of danger as follows: ‘Article 3 of the Convention applies not only to the danger emanating from State authorities but also where the danger emanates from persons or groups of persons who are not public officials’ (Case of N.A. v. Finland 2019, §73). This exemplifies that the ECtHR is a living legal instrument that provides an arena where non-citizens can have their human rights claims assessed. After the ruling, Migri announced that they have re-evaluated a number of decisions they have made and quite exceptionally, asked a number of asylum seekers still waiting for their decision to re-apply.

Conclusions

Taking hold of one of the central squares in Helsinki, a key purpose of the Right to Live demonstration, was to make a strong human rights claim to the Finnish state by bringing the suffering of asylum seekers, previously hidden inside the reception centres, out into the open and into the centre of the capital city. Right to Live – even in its name – was, and continues to be, an act of engaging in the human rights politics by the asylum seekers. They claim that the Finnish state should protect them based on the state’s legal obligation to protect the fundamental and human rights of individuals, including non-citizens, residing in their territories. By bringing into light the suffering and violence inflicted upon asylum seekers by the state – which I have called bureaucratic violence – asylum seekers have made strong claims that their human rights had been violated. In summary, asylum seekers are engaging in human rights politics and politicising human rights.

Protesters made visible the subjective and discretionary ways in which migration policies are implemented and the inherent bureaucratic violence that characterizes asylum and migration regimes. The activists formulated a critique against the bureaucratic violence the state inflicts on asylum seekers by rendering them illegal from one day to the next – thereafter denying them access to basic services – and by revealing the arbitrariness of the state that treats asylum seekers unequal before the law. The suffering and harm endured by asylum seekers transformed into desperate acts, such as suicide attempts, that can, in the framework of human rights politics, be also read as political acts. The protest demonstrated that the suffering of asylum seekers cannot be dismissed, as they too are people and that their lives matter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Academy of Finland [1284178] and the Kone Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Lena Näre

Lena Näre is a tenure-track Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include the study of migration and asylum, work and employment, care and transnationalism, intersectionality and ethnographic methods. She is the editor-in-chief (with S. Bendixsen) of Nordic Journal of Migration Research.

Notes

1. The names used in the article have all been changed to protect the identity of the study subjects.

2. The number of asylum seekers in Finland peaked in autumn 2015 at over 32,000 applicants, which was an unprecedented number in a country were the number of asylum seekers has historically been modest. For example, in 2014, the number of asylum seekers was a little over 3,000 (Migri 2019). In comparison to other EU and Nordic countries that received over 100,000 asylum seekers in 2015, this is a modest figure.

3. To date, Finland’s longest demonstration, Occupy Helsinki, which was in connection with the global Occupy movement, lasted over the course of eight months in 2011-2012. However, the Right to Live demonstration is not the first protest by asylum seekers in Finland. In 2012, two Afghan asylum seekers held a hunger strike for 79 days in front of the Parliament House (Pellander and Horsti 2018).

4.. The police dispersed the Suomi Maidan counter-demonstration due to the public disturbances that took place at the Helsinki Railway Square on 26 June 2017.