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Maryland, USA, 1775: a man traveling through a country where slavery was commonly accepted wrote “conduct is more convincing than language, and where people, by their actions, manifest that the slave-trade is not so disagreeable to their principles but that it may be encouraged, there is not a sound uniting with some Friends who visit them” (from the Journal of John Woolman).  

Ninety years before the end of slavery, he continued by saying “I believe liberty is [slaves] right, and as I see they are not only deprived of it, but treated in other respects with inhumanity in many places…" During these 90 years and until the civil war, one person after another joined the movement against slavery – considered acceptable for centuries.

Brussels, 2013: 238 years later, we consider ourselves as a kind of John Woolman. Today we think that slavery is wrong. That segregation is wrong and that discrimination is wrong.

The wrong in 1775 for John Woolman was slavery. My question is what is the “wrong” of today? Isn’t it the tragedy in the south of Europe, where at least 360 people died last week in Lampedusa? In the past two decades, almost 20,000 people have lost their lives in an effort to reach Europe's southern borders from Africa and the Middle East. Even if they reach our land, they are not treated humanely and sent to holding centres. Isn’t this the inhumanity of today?

My following question then is – who is today’s John Woolman?  Am I? Are we?

I am not, but Domenico Lucano certainly is.  His conduct has been reported by the newspaper “the Guardian”. Domenico Lucano is the mayor of Riace, a small village of Calabria in the south of Italy. "My parents always taught me to welcome strangers". As the journalist wrote, “the mayor has spent a decade trying to do something real to help the asylum seekers who risk their lives on rickety boats. The resettlement programme he has set up is one the European Union would do well to study as it wakes up to the waves of refugees pouring into Europe from Eritrea, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq”.

We need the movement for a human approach to migration to grow stronger to be able to change current EU migration laws in order to prevent further loss of life in the Mediterranean sea and protect the human rights of migrants and refugees. Yes, laws will have to change, as law was needed to ban slavery, segregation and discrimination.

Join the movement (you can read Amnesty’s proposals for a human rights approach to migration) and let’s not wait 238 years before we adopt a European migration policy anchored in human rights.  

Let’s engage!

Pierre Baussand, Director