Letter to the European Council

Dear Mr. President,

We write to convey our congratulations to your contribution to the European project, as Europeans at heart and African people of goodwill, deeply committed to the brotherhood and long history between our two continents.

During your term as President of the European Council, the European Union and its member states have externalized migration policy through direct and indirect cooperation with regimes and militia forces that are entirely unaccountable. Processes such as the EU-Horn of Africa Migration Route Initiative established in 2014, better known as the Khartoum Process,have provided the framework for such cooperation. Since the start of the Khartoum Process, organizations have there for erased concerns about this policy and the European Union’s complicity with systematic and severe human rights abuses conducted by such ‘partners’, the lack of transparency of the cooperation agreements and the lack of civil society participation in the projects and dialogues.

As part of this policy, both the European Union and individual member states have indirectly relied on external security forces and funded initiatives to train border guards, among others in Sudan and indirectly strengthened capacities to fulfill this role.The European Union has hidden behind the execution of such programmes by third parties. These policies have directly benefited and emboldened militia such as Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF),the former Janjaweed,by their own admission,whilst the RSF continues to commit war crimes in Darfur. This has not been without further consequence. The RSF have allegedly raped and murdered hundreds of protesters in recent months. Last week alone, protest crackdowns led to over a hundred deaths at the hands of the RSF as part of the Militia Council.The collaboration with various militia in Libya to block migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea has similarly emboldened the exploitation and extortion of refugees, under mining their protection.The support to the Eritrean regime to building roads with forced labor, as informed by the European Commission in its ‘Action Fiche’,is a flagrant violation of basic human rights.Increasing numbers of youth refugees have continued to flee the country trying to escape the indefinite national service built on cruelty and inhumane treatment.By entering into a partnership with third parties and regimes that have been found to commit crimes against humanity and who hold no regards to good governance, the rule of law and respect for human rights, the EU is violating its basic legal requirements, and it is undermining its basic values whilst undermining international law.