Políticas de fronteiras e saúde de populações refugiadas

Abstract

The current "refugee crisis" has been called the most serious humanitarian crisis in recent decades, with more than 22 million refugees worldwide, the largest contingents coming from Syria (5.5 million), Afghanistan (2.5 million), and Sudan (1.4 million) 1. Much recent media attention has focused on the arrival of refugees on Europe's borders-especially Greece and Italy. However, the approximately 2 million people that have reached Europe are proportionally few compared to those in Lebanon (1.1 million), Pakistan (1.4 million), and Turkey (2.9 million) 1. The vast majority of persons currently in situations of forced cross-border or internal displacement are in countries of the Global South, 67% of whom in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East 1. Although forced displacement of populations is probably as old as war itself, most of the legal mechanisms on the issue are recent, having emerged soon after World War II. The United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, from 1951, is still the world's main reference, defining refugee as someone who has to cross international borders due to well-founded fear of suffering persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a given social group 2. The convention was created in a historical context in which millions of European had sought asylum around the world. However, the direction changed in the 1980s, with a sharp increase in migratory flows from the countries of the Global South to the Global North 3,4,5. The so-called "no-entry" system has been consolidated since then. Many of the system's initial practices have been challenged in courts (and condemned) in recent decades, and several so-called developed countries have begun dodging such legal hurdles by "outsourcing" their border control policies. The latest generation of policies is anchored in the territories around Europe and focuses on containing refugees-and migrants-in their home countries or countries of transit, through increasingly intense collaboration with such nations as Turkey and Libya 6. The countries rely on various strategies for this purpose: prison construction, technical assistance, and technology transfer, among others. Such policies shape the paths needed to obtain asylum. It is essential to keep these paths in mind when we speak of the refugee population's health, since many of the health risks and outcomes are related to the spaces, times, and institutions comprising the "no-entry" systems: countries of origin and of transit, the border, the camp, the "asylum office", sometimes the detention or deportation center.