European countries are prematurely releasing thousands of prisoners and detained migrants following a recommendation from the commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, Dunja Mijatović.

The Council of Europe, which has 47 European country member states, told countries in an official statement to take this step to fight the coronavirus outbreak. According to Mijatović, all available alternatives to prison sentences should be used to slow the spread of the virus.

“I strongly urge all member states to make use of all available alternatives to detention whenever possible and without discrimination,” said Council of Europe representative Dunja Mijatović.

On March 26, Mijatovic demanded that all detained migrants should be freed across Europe, writing that these facilities “provide poor opportunities for social distancing and other measures to protect against COVID-19 infection”.

“I call on all Council of Europe member states to review the situation of rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants in immigration detention, and to release them to the maximum extent possible,” the commissioner wrote.

France and Germany release thousands of prisoners

So far, France and Germany have released thousands of prisoners nearing the end of their prison time and those suffering health issues. However, the Council of Europe, an institution that operates separately from the European Union, urged European countries to do even more, as it considers prisons to be hubs for coronavirus.

“I strongly urge all member states to make use of all available alternatives to detention whenever possible and without discrimination,” said Mijatović.

Last month, France announced that it would release about 5,000 prisoners. French Justice Ministry then announced that on April 1, France’s prison population shrank nine percent, from 72,575 to 66,309 in just two weeks.

Meanwhile, the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which is Germany’s most populated state, released about 1,000 inmates.

Many prison facilities had to deal with protests of inmates fearing the unbridled spread of the virus.

Last Friday, for example, about 40 inmates in Switzerland’s Champs-Dollon prison refused to return to their cells and demanded an immediate release from the prison due to the risk of the coronavirus infection.

Migrant detention center have also seen violence over the coronavirus. In Germany, after one migrant tested positive for coronavirus in Suhl asylum center, it led to mass riots after migrants attempted to break out from an imposed quarantine. When police intervened, migrants threatened to burn down the asylum center, used a child as a human shield, and threw objects at officers.

The United Kingdom has expressed concern that some early-release prisoners could travel to the country. Although the country has withdrawn from the EU, it still currently follows the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement, which allows EU citizens to travel to the UK and work there freely until the end of 2020.

“Individuals can be refused entry to the UK if they pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat. This includes EEA (European Economic Area) nationals who have been granted early prison release in an EU member state. Applicants to the EUSS (EU Settlement Scheme) can also be refused for serious or persistent criminality before the end of the transition period,” commented the British Home Office spokesman on the matter.

However, prison releases are a topic in the UK as well, with the country releasing about 4,000 low-risk prisoners will be released as a precaution. Inmates, who have less than two months of their sentence left, will be released with the Ministry of Justice monitoring them with an electronic tag.

“This is an unprecedented situation because if coronavirus takes hold in our prisons, the NHS could be overwhelmed and more lives put at risk,” explained Justice Minister Robert Buckland.

However, those convicted of violent or sexual offenses will not be considered for an early release.

Detained migrants are also being released in Europe

A number of countries have released detained migrants during the coronavirus crisis, including those set for deportation.

A previous report from Remix News showed how the Council of Europe has also promoted the mass release of migrants despite countries having no real solution for where to transfer them and little means for tracking released migrants who have no documentation.

In Belgium, 300 illegal migrants with no documentation were released after concerns in migrant detention centers that social distancing guidelines could not be followed due to overcrowding. The Brussels Times writes about the dilemma facing authorities who choose such measures:

In such cases, the sans-papiers, as they are known, are not forcibly placed on a flight to their homeland, but simply allowed to go out of the front door of the detention centre.

It is to be expected that many will disappear into clandestinely. Since they are without papers, tracing them from now on will be difficult if not impossible.

It is unclear if these migrants are being tested first for coronavirus before their release.

The UK released 350 migrants last month due to coronavirus concerns. The action appears to have emboldened politicians to demand the release 730 more migrants detained for immigration reasons, with 30 British MPs calling for their release.

Spain has also released “unreturnable migrant detainees” during the coronavirus crisis, including a detainee from Colombia, according to the European Council for Refugees and Exiles.

rmx.news/article/article/thousands-of-prisoners-and-detained-migrants-released-early-across-europe-due-to-coronavirus

At the ZASt refugee facility in Halberstadt, Germany, more than 800 migrants have been under quarantine since last week when one of them tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus. A group of 100 to 150 migrants at the facility started a violent riot against what they consider their poor accommodations. Left-wing groups seized on the opportunity to demand the migrants have even more free handouts. The German government quickly acquiesced.

Due to the facility quarantine, migrants have no longer been allowed to leave to do their own grocery shopping, so catered food is being delivered to them. Migrants are not been pleased with their halal meals nor the personal hygiene products they are receiving. The migrants have also expressed their anger at the lack of Wifi hotspots available to them. In response, migrants in the facility started a riot, refused the halal food and tore down fences that currently separate the three main buildings of the property.

Watch the two RAIR Foundation USA, translated videos detailing the riots at an migrant center in Halberstadt:

In response to the riots, Denise Vopel, a spokeswoman for the Saxony-Anhalt state administration office, announced Germany would reward the rioting migrants by meeting all of their special halal pork-free food, wifi, personal hygiene product demands while continuing to supply them with free living accommodations:

All demands have been accepted and efforts are being made to make the quarantine situation ‘as tolerable as possible’ for people.

Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party, reported that the left and their media are using the riot in order to gain political capital. The radical left-wing “Anti-racist Network Saxony-Anhalt” wrote a seven-page open letter demanding more tax-payer funded handouts for migrants. In addition, they planned a meeting to “advocate for the rights of asylum seekers”.

Left-wing groups and Islamic supremacists exploiting the coronavirus crisis for their political goals is nothing new. As RAIR recently reported, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his loyalists in Germany successfully exploited the coronavirus lockdown to justify broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer from their hundreds of mosques. 

Meanwhile, since the quarantine went into effect last week at the facility, 24 migrants have tested positive for the virus. These, as well as four negatively tested family members, have since been transferred to a specially set-up quarantine accommodation in Quedlinburg, Germany.

rairfoundation.com/germany-rewards-rioting-migrants-in-coronavirus-quarantine-with-free-housing-halal-food-wifi-pre-paid-phone-cards-video/

By Andrea Widburg

Just a few days ago, in a surprising departure from Christian doctrine, Pope Francis suggested that the earth (aka Gaia) has brought COVID-19 to the world as revenge for Climate Change. Apparently, she’s angry about all the North Pole glaciers that melted. (The Pope might have missed that, just last July, the North Pole had “extraordinarily thick ice” or that the winter sea ice is currently at its highest level in seven years.)

For Pope Francis watchers, this pronouncement was not a surprise. Argentina, where the Pope had his Catholic training and ministry, practices “liberation theology,” which is a fusion of leftism and Catholicism. In various Papal pronouncements, he’s preached economic Marxism and anthropogenic climate change, both of which seem somewhat far afield for a Vicar of Christ who should be concerned with the state of his flock’s souls.

For Easter, Pope Francis took another dive into Marxist economics. This time, in a letter to “Dear Friends” who are community organizers, he echoes other leftists around the world by saying that the fallout from COVID-19 means that world governments should begin to distribute a “universal basic income” to all citizens. Although it has some Catholic ideas woven through it, the letter’s language is mostly pure modern Marxism:

Market solutions do not reach the peripheries, and State protection is hardly visible there. Nor do you have the resources to substitute for its functioning. You are looked upon with suspicion when through community organization you try to move beyond philanthropy or when, instead of resigning and hoping to catch some crumbs that fall from the table of economic power, you claim your rights. You often feel rage and powerlessness at the sight of persistent inequalities and when any excuse at all is sufficient for maintaining those privileges.

[snip]

My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven) are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humankind. Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share. I know that you have been excluded from the benefits of globalization. You do not enjoy the superficial pleasures that anesthetize so many consciences, yet you always suffer from the harm they produce. The ills that afflict everyone hit you twice as hard. Many of you live from day to day, without any type of legal guarantee to protect you. Street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers: you who are informal, working on your own or in the grassroots economy, you have no steady income to get you through this hard time … and the lockdowns are becoming unbearable. This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out. (Emphasis added.)

That is the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’s never worked in the private sector, and never managed a payroll. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’s steeped in the Marxist notion of wealth inequality, which posits a stagnant world in which people have no economic movement and are all trying to obtain pieces of the same financial pie.

The Pope is certainly correct that people with limited financial resources are suffering terribly from the lockdowns. The answer, though, is not to give them free money. It’s to stop the lockdowns, give masks to people, practice other common-sense ways to prevent contagion, and rely on developing more and better treatments for the virus.

For those wondering what’s wrong with a “universal basic income,” here are a few points:

1. It’s printing money, which simply drives inflation. If everyone gets “X” dollars or pesos or euros, all prices will go up accordingly because there’ll be more dollars chasing goods.
2. It’s hugely expensive, which creates a more significant burden on working taxpayers, even as UBI creates a disincentive for work.
3. By giving everyone money, UBI diverts available funds from those who need them most.

The tried and true way to deal with poverty is a free market system in which the government, rather than playing favorites, polices the market for fraud and protects workers from being exploited. Couple this with low taxes and community-based welfare programs, and you have the pre-COVID Trump economy. That economy led to extraordinary economic growth that saw thelowest unemployment ever for previously disadvantaged groups, as well as real wage growth amongst the lowest earners.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/the_virus_continues_to_highlight_pope_franciss_leftism.html

On April 9, in France, one of the three European countries most affected by COVID-19 — the others being Spain and Italy, 1,341 people died from the Chinese Communist Party virus. For Italy, the main European country affected so far, the figure on April 9 was 610 deaths; for Spain 446, and for Germany 266. While the pandemic has been stabilizing in Italy and Spain — and in Germany seems contained — in France it seems still expanding.

Extremely bad decisions taken by the authorities created a situation of contagion more destructive than it should have been.

The first bad decision was that, in contrast to European Union fantasies, borders apparently do matter. France never closed them; instead it allowed large numbers of potential virus-carriers to enter the country. Even when it became clear that in Italy the pandemic was taking on catastrophic proportions, France’s border with Italy remained open. The Italian government, by contrast, on March 10, prohibited French people coming to its territory or Italians going to France, but to date, France has put no controls on its side of the border.

The situation is the same on France’s border with Spain, despite the terrifying situation there. Since March 17, it has been virtually impossible to go from France to Spain, but coming to France from Spain is easy: you just show a police officer your ID. The same goes for France’s border with Germany. On March 16, Germany closed its border with France, but France declined to do the same for its border with Germany. When, on February 26, a soccer match between a French team and an Italian team took place in Lyon, the third-largest city in France, 3,000 Italian supporters attended, even though patients were already flocking to Italy’s hospitals.

France never closed its airports; they are still open to “nationals of EEA Member States, Switzerland, passengers with a British passport, and those with residence permits issued by France” and healthcare professionals. Earlier, until the last days of March, people arriving from China were not even subject to health checks. French people in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic originated, were repatriatedby a military plane, and, upon their arrival in France, were placed in quarantine. While Air France interrupted its flights to China on January 30, Chinese and other airlines departing from Shanghai and Beijing continue to land in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron summarized France’s official position on the practice: “Viruses do not have passports,” he said. Members of the French government repeated the same dogma. A few commentators reminded them that viruses travel with infected people, who can be stopped at borders, and that borders are essential to stop or slow the spread of a disease, but the effort was useless. Macron ended up saying that the borders of the Schengen area (26 European states that have officially abolished all passport and border control with one another) could not be shut down and raged at other European leaders for reintroducing border checks between the Schengen area member countries. “What is at stake,” he said, seemingly more concerned with the “European project” than with the lives of millions of people, “is the survival of the European project.”

Other bad decisions the disastrous management of the means of fighting the pandemic.

In early March, when people in large numbers started to arrive ill at hospitals, doctors and caregivers warned that they did not have enough masks and said that working without any protective equipment put them at high risk. Journalists quickly discovered that in 2013, France had possessed a reserve of several million masks, but that the government had decided to destroy them to reduce storage costs. In January 2020, a few hundred thousand masks were still available, but on February 19, President Macron decided to send them to Wuhan, as a “gesture of solidarity with the Chinese people”.

The French government then announced that masks would be available soon, but by the end of March, most doctors and caregivers still had no masks. Several doctors fell ill. As of April 10, eight have died from COVID-19 and several others are in critical condition. On March 20, the government’s spokeswoman, Sibeth N’Diaye, incorrectly said that “masks are essentially useless”.

At the end of February, France had almost no tests available, and no means of manufacturing them. The government decided to buy tests from China, but by March 19, the number of tests was still insufficient. While Germany performed 500,000 screening tests per week, France was only able to only perform 50,000.

Rather than admit that tests were unavailable, or that the government had mismanaged situation, the France’s minister of health, Olivier Veran, announced that large-scale screening was useless, and that France had chosen to “proceed differently”.

Municipal elections, scheduled for March 15, took place despite the virus and despite the fact that many doctors warned that polling stations were places of contagion. Sure enough, in the days that followed, hundreds of people in charge of polling stations flocked to the hospitals. On March 16, President Macron delivered a speech declaring that “France is at war” and that on the following day, March 17, France would be placed on lockdown.

Lockdown is still in place and the French government has decided to extend it indefinitely. The rules are strict. The French can only leave home, within a radius of one kilometer, for one hour a day, to buy food, and must have written authorization to present to the police who patrol the streets. Anyone who is on a street without authorization is fined 135 euros ($145) the first time, 1,500 euros ($1,630) the second time, and after three offenses, can be subject to a sentence of six months in prison. Any meeting with a person not sharing the same place of lockdown is prohibited.

Most of the population has complied, except in the no-go zones. The police have been ordered to turn a blind eye to what happens there. The no-go zone in Seine Saint Denis, for instance, has a fatality rate 63% higher than in the rest of the country.

It was not exactly a secret that before the pandemic that the French economy had also not been doing that well. Growth was barely above zero and unemployment high. Now, the French economy has effectively stopped. It is hard to imagine what the situation will be after the pandemic.

Now, almost all the French hospitals are full; patients wait on beds in the halls. On March 18, France had only 5,000 ventilators, so “triage” procedures began: some patients survived, others, for lack of treatment, did not.

A scandal erupted. Agnes Buzyn — who was Minister of Health until February 16, then a candidate for mayor of Paris; then, on March 15, defeated — said on March 18: “I knew a tsunami [presumably meaning a deadly pandemic] was going to hit France”. She added that she had told everything to President Macron in January. Immediately, Marine Le Pen, President of the National Rally, the main opposition party in France, said that “by staying silent about a worrying situation, Agnes Buzyn behaved in an unconscionable manner”. Le Pen added, “if Agnes Buzyn is speaking the truth, the government and President Macron have seriously failed in their duties, and the case will have to be brought before a Court of Justice”.

Another scandal, however, even more important, had erupted before that. On February 25, a celebrated French epidemiologist, Professor Didier Raoult, President of the Marseille University Hospital Institute for Infectious Diseases (Méditerranée Infection), one of the main European research centers on epidemics and pandemics, published a video, “Coronavirus: Towards a way out of the crisis”. In it, he said that he had found a treatment to infected people quickly: hydroxychloroquine (a drug used against malaria since 1949) and azithromycin (a commonly used antibiotic), that had already cured 24 patients.

Immediately, Olivier Veran, the new French minister of health, said that Professor Raoult’s statements were “unacceptable”. A harsh medical and political battle began. Many doctors close to President Macron agreed with Veran and denounced Raoult. Some even claimed he was a “charlatan”, apparently forgetting that, until then, Professor Raoult had been considered by many France’s most prestigiousepidemiologist. Other doctors said that Dr. Raoult was right and supported his findings.

In an attempt to quell the controversy, the French government, by decree, authorized Professor Raoult’s treatment in “military hospitals” for “patients reaching the acute phase of the disease” — but prohibited family doctors from prescribing hydroxychloroquine. Professor Raoult replied that the treatment was only effective if administered “before the disease reaches its acute phase“. [Emphasis added]

A clinical trial was launched by the government but Professor Raoult said that “the trial is not based on the treatment I use and is destined to fail.”

On April 10, Professor Raoult published data showing that he had treated and cured 2,401 patients. A recent international poll of thousands of doctors ratedhydroxychloroquine the “most effective therapy” for combating COVID 19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized widespread “compassionate use” of hydroxychloroquine, while awaiting the results of scientific tests, projects to be complete in “a year or a year and a half”.

Philippe Douste Blazy, Professor in Medicine, former French Minister of Health, said that “the obstructive behavior of Emmanuel Macron and the French government ‘was “criminal'”. He added that “the treatment proposed by Professor Raoult has positive results” and that “France will soon be the last country to refuse the use by doctors of hydroxychloroquine.” He then launched a petition calling on the government to stop obstructing the use of the treatment. The text was signed by thousands of doctors, professors of medicine and other former ministers of health.

The treatment recommended by Professor Raoult still cannot be prescribed by French family doctors. A decree promulgated by President Macron on March 28 authorized doctors to use Rivotril (clonazepam) to “alleviate the suffering of patient in a state of respiratory distress”. Clonazepam slows breathing and can lead to respiratory arrest. Dr. Christian Coulon, a renowned anesthesiologist, tweeted:

“Euthanasia of our elders suffering from respiratory failure. Yes, they decided [to do] it. As a doctor, I suffer deeply”.

Dr. Serge Rader explained on radio on April 3 that many senior citizens living in retirement homes and who get Covid-19 are not sent to a hospital because the hospitals are overwhelmed; instead they receive an injection of Rivotril and die alone in their rooms. Many other doctors expressed their horror on social media, but added that they were powerless.

The result is that anxiety and anger have increased sharply in the population and add to the distress arising from the pandemic and the strict lockdown.

A French lawyer, Regis de Castelnau, wrote in Marianne, a center-left magazine:

“The behavior of our leaders has been marked by unpreparedness, casualness, cynicism, and many of their acts imply the enforcement of the criminal law. Deliberate endangerment of the lives of others and failure to provide assistance to people in danger are obvious… In war, generals who are judged incompetent are sometimes shot. The President and other officials are well aware of this and have to know that they will be held accountable.”

Economists expect the GDP of France in the second quarter of 2020 to be in free fall. One economist, Emmanuel Lechypre, said, “France will experience a very severe recession…. What is happening has never been seen in the past and the country will never be the same.”

A recent survey shows that 70% of French people think that the government is not telling the truth, and 79% think that the government and the President do not know where they are going.

Before the pandemic, France was on the edge of chaos. From the moment President Macron was elected, not a single week in France has passed without demonstrations. The uprising of the “yellow vests” lasted 70 weeks and was accompanied by riots. A strike against a reform of the bankrupt French pension system that began in December 2019 lasted until the appearance of the pandemic.

On March 27, Macron said in a threatening tone that those who criticized his handling of the pandemic were “irresponsible” and that he would remember “those who did not live up to his expectations”.

On April 1, the columnist Ivan Rioufol wrote in Le Figaro:

“The president is not only wrong, but he lied and let others lie. He and his team are guilty. The official speech was unable to assess the seriousness of the situation. It denied, to the point of absurdity, the usefulness of national borders… It is the government that repeated, before claiming the contrary, that masks and tests are useless. It is the State that maintains an incomprehensible confusion around chloroquine… The law of silence that Macron would like to impose is completely untenable.”

Those who hold power in France seem more clueless today than before the pandemic. Sadly, a debacle in France seems increasingly closer.

In the French mainstream media, China is treated extremely politely. No journalist will remind the public that that the pandemic began in Wuhan, China. Reporters say that the United States is in a difficult situation and show New York hospitals, as if showing the suffering of Americans would alleviate the suffering of the French.

France’s mainstream media would do well to fight harder for physicians to be able supply hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin and zinc sulfate. The French media would also do well to be more aware of the dirty game China is playing. On April 5, reports started coming in that in January, before China had let the world know there was a problem, it had begun deliberately lying about it. On January 14, 2020, in a tweet, the World Health Organization repeated China’s lie:

“Investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”

Meanwhile, Maria Bartiromo disclosed on Fox News, that, before alerting the world about the coronavirus crisis, China had begun cornering the market in medical supplies. It bought $2 billion worth of medical masks — China makes half the world’s supply; why would it buy them? — as well as hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of other medical gear. Now, reports are stating that China is demanding payment from Italy for donated medical equipment that Italy had donated to China and that China now wants Italy to buy back.

Finally, it would not hurt the French media to show more compassion, to pay more attention to what they say, to watch with more care their own society, and to think about ways to find remedies to the economic and political dysfunction that unleashed such an unimaginable horror.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15880/coronavirus-france-disaster

All 16 German federal states have now admitted intensive care patients from other EU countries or at least offered treatment.

A survey by German weekly Welt am Sonntag shows that almost all 16 federal states now care for intensive care patients from other EU countries. The number rose significantly, especially from the Netherlands.

All federal states have now admitted Covid-19 patients or at least offered intensive care beds and in some cases provided medical equipment or medical expertise.

North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Saarland currently care for most Covid-19 patients from other EU countries. According to the Stuttgart state government, 28 patients from France and two from Italy are treated there. There are 23 French patients in Saarland. According to the North Rhine-Westphalian state government, ten patients from Italy, eight from France and 39 patients from the Netherlands have been treated clinically.

While the demand from Italy for available intensive care beds in Germany are in decline, the number of inquiries from the Netherlands has recently increased significantly. The state government in Lower Saxony is “in close contact with the government of the Netherlands in order to be able to provide administrative assistance in some difficult cases if the local health system gets into a situation of temporary overload”.

According to Johns Hopkins University 25 587 people in the Netherlands have so far tested positive, the number of those who died was much higher than in Germany, at 2 700. Experts attribute the higher mortality rate to the significantly lower number of intensive care capacities in the clinics in the neighboring country compared to Germany.

According to feedback from the federal states, the number has now increased to 40 patients within a week.

But the number of Germany’s Covid-19 cases grew by 2 537 over the past 24 hours to climb to 123 016, according to the Robert Koch Institute. The death toll also increased by 126 to 2 799.

freewestmedia.com/2020/04/13/germany-accepts-intensive-care-patients-from-other-eu-countries/

Video from the 11th April 2020: Of course the Sonnenallee in the Berlin district of Neukölln. This diverse avenue inspires many people in Berlin.Hardly any ethnic Germans are to be seen there and if you drive there by car, it has been necessary to barricade the car doors there since the 90s.

politikstube.com/berlin-feierliche-osterpruegelei-am-samstag/

Migrant ‘youths’ in Brussels, Belgium rioted and pelted police with stones and heavy objects on Friday night into Saturday afternoon. Initial reports suggest that the rioters may have even stolen a gun from a destroyed police vehicle.

The riots began in response to a fatal accident that occurred in Anderlecht, Brussels after a 19-year-old attempted to flee from a police check. After news about the accident had spread, migrant youths began encouraging one another on social media to take revenge on police, Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad reports.

“Despite the lockdown and the ban on gatherings, social media had called for a Saturday afternoon meeting in Anderlecht,” said police spokeswoman Adeline Roty.

It wasn’t long until the rioting commenced. Large groups of migrant youths started several fires in the area and pelted police with glass bottles, stones, and large objects. Two police officers were injured, one police vehicle was completely destroyed, and other police vehicles suffered significant damage during the violence.

The rioters were also able to steal one or more firearms from the police vehicle that was destroyed, according to eye witness reports.

Eyewitnesses of the chaos said that a young immigrant man ran away from the destroyed police vehicle with gun after loud shots were heard.

voiceofeurope.com/2020/04/video-migrant-youths-riot-and-attack-police-vehicles-in-brussels-during-lockdown/