As published in the Volume 2(1) of Ramjas Poltical Review
Abstract
In recent decades, humanitarianism has gained prominence by focusing on mitigating the suffering of the sick, tortured, starved, and wounded beyond the political space. Humanitarianism at the outset was a legitimising tool for addressing human suffering. Theoretically and originally, it was supposed to give such humans the legitimacy to be aided regardless of the larger contextual aspects. However, when humanitarian principles were implemented in different countries beyond conflicts and large-scale wars, it led to other consequences. The essay examines some of these consequences, particularly in the contemporary period of immigration restrictions. Drawing on Miriam Ticktin’s (2006) analysis, it explores how humanitarianism also became a form of politics despite its purported apolitical nature. As a result of this change, the bodies of immigrants and refugees, as embodiments of human suffering, acquire their own political language. The essay concludes by showing that this political language is often translated arbitrarily and ambiguously by governments while making refugee and immigration decisions due to the presence of humanitarian rather than juridical laws.
Keywords: Humanitarianism, Refugee Crisis, Immigration, Medical Humanitarianism, Political Sociology
History of Humanitarianism
Historically, humanitarianism evolved as a response to conflicts amidst the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars from 1793 to 1814 (Hardy et al., 2016). However, it was only in 1859, at the Battle of Solferino, that humanitarianism rose and had such a lasting impact up until the 20th Century when it continued to play a prominent role in the formulation of the Geneva Conventions, which are globally recognised as International Humanitarian Laws. The man behind this was Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman who was horror-struck to see the condition of the neglected wounded soldiers in Solferino as there were no organised systems to treat the wounded on the battlefield. This led to him establishing the Red Cross to care for sick and wounded soldiers (Hardy et al., 2016). Today, it is the largest humanitarian organisation in the world with branches present in various countries.
Over the decades, humanitarianism as an idea has gathered mass appeal beyond global war, especially in the space of migrant crisis and conflict zones. In its theoretical dimension, humanitarianism is conceptualised as the “ethical and moral imperative to bring relief to those suffering and to save life” (Ticktin, 2006). The paradigm has evolved beyond its confines of treating wounded soldiers in wars, extending its scope to encompass the broader objective of alleviating human suffering and safeguarding lives in different circumstances. Among these circumstances, the issue of refugees and immigrants plays a particularly significant role as both of them are influenced by humanitarianism. The 1951 Refugee Convention’s Preamble highlights its wish that states recognise “the social and humanitarian nature of the problem of refugees” (United Nations, 1951). Under the convention, individuals fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion should be offered asylum by countries. This is a direct employment of humanitarian principles, where the prime focus of the states should be on safeguarding those whose lives are in grave danger. Similarly, the question of immigrants is also approached from humanitarian principles. One such principle followed in many European countries is a residence permit for medical reasons, i.e., granting illness permits for life-threatening diseases (Cailhol et al., 2020). This policy is also rooted in humanitarianism, as it prioritises the health and well-being of the people, regardless of their citizenship and legal status (Ticktin, 2006).
However, the rise of humanitarian policies and laws was accompanied by a growing mistrust of refugees in Europe (Fassin, 2011). Fassin (2011) examines that beginning in the mid-1970s, immigration restrictions were imposed, which further exacerbated the situation as the confusion between refugees and immigrants rose. Governments began to justify the increasing restrictions by referencing the bogus refugees as candidates tried to apply for asylum under false pretences. For instance, in 1976 France granted 19 out of 20 asylum seekers refugee status; however, three decades later, 19 out of 20 were denied, illustrating a sharp increase in mistrust and tightening of restrictions on refugees (Fassin, 2011). Jacques Chirac, the President of France from 1995 to 2007, famously mentioned “the noise and the smell” of immigrants in his speech referring to the overdose of immigrants in France (Michallon, 2019). During his tenure as the Prime Minister of France, he also mentioned their government’s work on controlling illegal immigrants and enhancing French security (mediaclip, 1988). It becomes clear that the government drew the picture of growing immigrants as a security threat to the country.
The Political Language of the Immigrants and Refugees’ Bodies
In this simultaneously growing ground of humanitarianism, immigration, and refugee restrictions, the human body takes on a central role (Fassin, 2011). At the core of humanitarian ideals lies the human body and its experience and manifestation of pain. Sickness, wounds, injury, scars, starvation, et cetera, are all manifested on the body wherein they are recognised and aided based on humanitarian principles. This is why the evidence of bodily marks has become important in granting humanitarian aid in many European countries (Fassin, 2011). Medical and psychological certificates attesting to the past experiences of refugees are a key feature of getting refugee status amidst the growing stringent immigration laws (Fassin and d'Halluin, 2005).
In this way, under humanitarianism, the body of a refugee became a site for the search for truth, i.e., the evidence of bodily injury (Fassin, 2011). At the same time and in almost a contradiction, a refugee’s body was also a site of violence and exhibition of the state’s power (Fassin, 2011). As Max Weber (1994) puts it, the state protects its people from violence, and in return, it earns the monopoly of legitimate violence. This is what Fassin (2011, p. 264) calls the “foundational violence” of the state. This violence is manifested in the body when the state power leaves its traces – both physical and psychological. So, in the case of a refugee, the body is at once the “site of the inscription of power through persecution” in the home country and also a site where the truth of this power or persecution is sought in the host country (Fassin, 2011, p. 287). Their body acquires its own political language as the existence of physical or psychic scars on or within the body takes precedence over the voices and personal narratives in determining state decisions regarding asylum.
Similarly, for immigrants, as noted above, many European countries have added a residence permit for medical reasons (Cailhol et al., 2020). For instance, in 1998, France adopted the policy of giving temporary illness permits in cases where undocumented migrants suffer from a life-threatening disease (Ticktin, 2006). In this way, the bodies of immigrants also acquire a political language since the presence (or absence) of an illness determines their access to stay within a country. For these immigrants, the nature and intensity of sickness in their bodies are measured through the line drawn by the sovereign power, in this case, France, which decides their legal status and illness permits. Consider this, the first question that social workers in NGOs usually ask the undocumented immigrants is, ‘Are you sick?’ and the next is, ‘How sick?’ The workers hope the answer to be ‘Very sick’ (Ticktin, 2006, p. 34). This situation arose not due to some hidden malice but because immigrants’ illness provided them with an evident means by which to apply for a permit to stay in France. Ticktin (2006) outlines how some immigrants had even inquired about how to infect themselves with HIV and consequently obtain permits in France. The illness permit, based on the humanitarian principle of caring for the sick (Ticktin 2006), ends up making the immigrants’ bodies acquire a political language. The host country interprets this political language to make decisions about granting or denying asylum. Similarly, although a refugee’s body first gains political language through political violence afflicted on it by the home country, it is through the presence of humanitarian laws that the body’s political language takes precedence over personal narratives.
The Politics of Apolitical Humanitarianism
Although humanitarianism began as an apolitical moral imperative to recognise the suffering of the sick and wounded, its application within different countries made the political language of the body the kernel of humanitarian laws and policies for both refugees and immigrants. In the case of refugees, the troubling part of this aspect is that as governments and their asylum courts are asking for more and more evidence, there has been an increase in the techniques of torture that minimise traces left on the body (Rejali, 2007). This is further worsened by the discredit of the refugee’s words. As the demand for evidence of physical or psychic traces increases, it leads to the “disqualification of the word of asylum seekers” (Fassin, 2011, p. 288). When the first-hand narratives of refugees are relegated as secondary evidence in the analysis of abuse, which shows that their account may not be the most trustworthy, the conditions for believing the authenticity of their bodily evidence also get complicated. For example, Fassin (2011) draws the story of a Bangladeshi man presenting a picture of him severely injured lying in a hospital bed in front of the National Court of Asylum in France. He claimed that he was abused because of his religious beliefs and activism. The president asked him, “What proves to me that you did not fall from your bicycle?” (Fassin, 2011, p. 268). Refugees lose their moral credibility when their personal accounts are taken to be subordinate to evidence (Fassin, 2011). Under such circumstances, how do officers and judges believe the primary evidence in the form of medical certificates and other documentation, which too are provided by the same refugees?
This approach to granting refugee status is arbitrary in two main ways. First, the Refugee Convention states that a refugee is “any person who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (United Nations, 1951). According to the convention, the host country should grant refugee status based on “well-founded fear” rather than demanding conclusive evidence of endured torture and persecution. However, recognition of sources as “evidence of fear” can be difficult to decide and may again lead to arbitrary decision-making. The deeper problem lies in the lack of clear and transparent criteria outlining the evidence and elements that courts and, or state officials require for granting refugee status. This lack of clarity is mainly because refugee law and policies are based on humanitarian ideals rather than on the commonly followed legal frameworks (Ticktin, 2006). It contributes to the arbitrary nature of decision-making in refugee status determinations. Since there are no structured rules regarding the evidence and proof accepted by the judges, refugees are left uncertain about the criteria used to evaluate their claims and are unable to contest the decisions made by the courts.
This arbitrariness is also most strikingly visible in the case of illness permits for immigrants. Although states have allowed granting illness permits to immigrants, they have not defined what diseases are classified as life-threatening. Consider this, the French state medical offices of three departments are vastly different in their results of granting papers. One of them gives papers for almost all pathologies, while the other two give papers to only those suffering from terminal illnesses like Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and cancer, and they may or may not give papers for chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart diseases, et cetera. On psychiatric problems, such as ADHD (Ticktin, 2006), they differ significantly with one of them having an 80 per cent positive response while the other has 0 per cent (Delettre 1999; Fassin 2001). If one refugee is given a permit for a specific disease while another is denied for the same disease by different departments, they cannot approach the court to redress the difference in the judgement of the state officials, since the government has not officially classified life-threatening pathologies. Other important factors such as the people’s ability to access treatment in their home country, the means to pay for the required medical trips, the location and means of transport to hospitals, et cetera, are also not considered (Ticktin, 2006). Moreover, every few months, the medical officials have to demonstrate their statistics to the state officials. Ticktin (2006, p. 42) highlights how medical officials are jovially warned at the end of these meetings to “drastically reduce the number of sick people they let in.” This influences the doctors' and nurses’ decisions regarding their immigrant patients since their legitimacy among state officials depends on the number of immigrants they allow to stay. Without any pre-defined criteria for illness permits to refer to and justify their statistics, medical officials may not be left with any choice but to make arbitrary decisions in some cases.
The arbitrariness in handling cases of refugees and immigrants is largely because humanitarianism operates outside a strict legal framework. Humanitarianism emphasises a “politics of compassion” (Ticktin, 2006, p. 42) where benevolence takes precedence over justice and actions of charity over actions of obligation that come with a structured legal basis. Ticktin (2006) elucidates this aspect of humanitarianism where it transforms into a form of politics that has led to the employment from juridical to humanitarian logic. It frees the government and officials from the accountability and responsibility that comes with clearly laid down laws. Humanitarian laws lack a predetermined legal structure and such laws are often left open-ended, thus becoming ambiguous in their scope (Ticktin, 2006). It becomes difficult for refugees and immigrants to approach the court with a concrete case due to the ambiguity of these laws.
Since humanitarianism is rooted more in ethical values to alleviate suffering rather than actions undertaken in favour of justice (Ambrosini, 2022), countries are able to ignore laying down a rigid legal framework to deal with cases of refugees and migrants seeking asylum. The lack of a legal structure in humanitarianism also implies that there is no procedure for challenging decisions. Refugees and immigrants, unable to predict or contest the grounds on which judgments are based, may encounter deep uncertainty and injustice. Hence, humanitarian politics can both develop and further perpetuate inequalities and inconsistencies in how humanitarian assistance is provided and how asylum and immigration cases are resolved. Fassin (2012, p. 12) hints at the same arguing that humanitarianism “elicits the fantasy of a global moral community that may still be viable and the expectation that solidarity may have redeeming powers.” However, this ‘fantasy’ may obscure the deeper issue of consistency and accountability in making decisions based on compassion regarding the status of refugees and immigrants.
The ambiguity around humanitarian laws becomes more detrimental in the current times when countries are limiting the entry of refugees and immigrants, and imposing stricter immigration laws. The possibility of making decisions at their discretion gives governments an advantage due to the presence of a humanitarian rather than juridical approach underlying such laws and policies. This ability of governments to make discretionary decisions allows them to manage and shape their immigration situation in the name of humanitarianism. While humanitarianism remains a relevant concept in the contemporary world with growing local and international conflicts, it is equally significant to recognise its evolution into a form of politics cloaked under the guise of being apolitical.
Conclusion
The progression of humanitarianism from an apolitical endeavour into a complex and politically entangled practice within states reveals significant consequences for refugees and immigrants. Based on Miriam Ticktin's analysis of humanitarianism as a form of politics, it has led to the bodies of refugees and immigrants acquiring a political language that may be interpreted arbitrarily based on the decisions and political agendas of the state. Since laws are grounded in a humanitarian approach, they do not follow a structured legal basis. The application of such laws becomes subject to the discretion of state officials and their interpretations (Ticktin, 2006). This shift from humanitarian neutrality to a politicised framework shows the unintended consequences of humanitarianism in the contemporary world. It demonstrates that the very principles employed to protect and support the vulnerable may be arbitrarily used to determine their fate.
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The author, Anamta Husain, is a student at Ashoka University.
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