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The Repatriation of European Nationals from Syria as Contested before Domestic Courts in Belgium and Beyond
In the wake of the fall of the Daesh Islamic State “Caliphate” in 2019, the international community has been faced with the fact that thousands of displaced persons are stranded in Iraqi and Syrian detention centers. This article interrogates the governmental policies of ten Western European countries toward their nationals and legal residents held in the prisons and camps. We analyze the discourse and the practices of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the “foreign-terrorist-fighter-citizens.” We find that the Western European governments have engaged in different types of deterritorialization and reterritorialization moves which have acted to position their foreign fighter nationals and dependents at the liminars of the body politic in a way that runs the risk of perpetuating the foreign fighters’ and their dependents’ confinement in, what some practitioners have denounced as, “Europe's Guantanamo.” We also argue that the deterritorialization and reterritorialization moves reveal the emptiness of the current-day liberal state project at its core. The discourses and practices place the liberal democratic state at odds with its own declared values and with the basic human rights of the foreign-terrorist-fighter-citizen in a manner that is corrosive to other citizens and to the ideals inherent to “good life” of the political community.
The civil war in Syria caused several hundreds of young people from Belgium and the Netherlands to join ISIS in Syria. Since a couple of years, the main question is how to deal with the children of those Syrian fighters. This contribution examines whether those children are modern exiles, or whether they are fully covered by the extraterritorial human rights obligations of the state of which they are a national. Recent jurisprudence of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and of the European Court of Human Rights guides this exercise. This contribution looks into three core legal questions: does the state of nationality of the children of Syria fighters hold children and human rights obligations towards them?
About 700 European children are stranded with their mothers in the detention camps in northeast Syria. They are children of European departees who travelled to the Levant after 2012 to join one of the fighting forces against the Syrian regime. Most European countries refuse to repatriate these children because of their parents, who are considered terrorists. This paper investigates the status of these children through the analysis of the political and media-debates and ongoing collaborative ethnographic research in Belgium. We argue that these children reside in a condition of virtual innocence, which is characterized by a continuous interrogation of their social, political, and ontological status as well as their right to life. This condition of virtual innocence also sheds a different light on the state of exception: rather than being expressed through a permanent ban, it becomes manifested through an undecided and pending inclusion into the bios.
Terreurorganisatie Islamitische Staat trok heel wat Europese jongeren aan. Velen van hen kwamen om, een deel keerde terug naar het land van herkomst en een andere groep verblijft nog steeds in het conflictgebied. Al jaren worstelen landen met de problematiek van berechting en bestraffing van deze Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTF’s). De ernst van de misdrijven zorgt ervoor dat er diverse mogelijkheden zijn: lokaal berechten, berechten in het land van herkomst of een proces voor een hof of tribunaal. Naast de internationale regels omtrent jurisdictie en bestraffing van terreur, spelen ook emotionele en ethische overwegingen een rol. De internationale gemeenschap wil terroristen verantwoordelijk stellen voor hun daden en dit mits respect voor rule of law en mensenrechten, maar ook burgers verwachten dat misdadigers gestraft worden. Familieleden van Syriëgangers willen vaak dat de (klein)kinderen geholpen worden, terwijl experts het veiligheidsrisico in overweging nemen bij het afwegen van de diverse opties. Dit leidt tot een complexe situatie die dringend opgelost moet worden.
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