Migration

The European right to freedom of movement allows any EU citizen to live, work and move freely between Member States, ensuring equal treatment and non-discrimination. However, if you take a closer look at this picture, some gaps appear. As is tragic with respect to most such gaps, it is already-vulnerable groups which are most likely to fall through them.

Six poems created from the short messages of 50 foreign-born people on the theme What I Am (Not). They were invited to reflect on their experience as a foreign-born person now living in the Czech Republic – on how they see themselves and their identity.

“I will not bring 18-year-old Afghans to the Czech Republic because I consider it a security risk,” said Czech Interior Minister Jan Hamáček of the Social Democrats at the beginning of the year, when the country was asked to take in 40 unaccompanied migrants and refugees from Greece’s overflowing refugee camps. He had reiterated different variations on that position before then and has repeated them since, most recently after the blaze that razed the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos to the ground, leaving thousands of unaccompanied minors and hundreds of parents accompanying their children homeless.

Since 2015 the Hungarian government has systematically demolished the asylum system, by now people are starving in the transit zones at the Southern border of Hungary.