Adding to the “Declaration of Paris”
(Conseil d’Administration MEDEL, Paris, 22.10.2016).
Every day, as helpless onlookers, we see the terrible images of people dying at sea or on the frontiers of our countries. All of us have tales of emigration in our family trees, and all human beings are a result of the will, or the need, to change our location, our nation, or our continent. The history of mankind is nothing less than the history of migration.
Allowing these deaths to occur in silence, numbed after each news report or article, accustomed and impervious to the visual impact of this tragedy, we simply change channel, turn off the television, and carry on with our daily lives.
We turn our backs, we distance ourselves from the suffering of people who are just like us. We live with this injustice, and we accept that thousands of people lose their lives, compromise their dignity, and set aside their human condition just to seek a better life. The future will be unforgiving with us, because we have tolerated and continue to tolerate such an endless tragedy.
Through MEDEL, thanks to our status as professionals, from our comfortable position as judges and public prosecutors, we are obliged to fight, to propose solutions, to raise our voices, and to ensure that our conscience, our sense of justice, and our respect for the dignity of human beings do not become numbed, and continue to fight for this end. We fight for them.
MEDEL pays tribute to all those who assist and save the life of refugees and immigrants with their own efforts.
MEDEL requests the collaboration of FRONTEX in the provision of the indispensable aid for the rescue of human lives.
11th March, 2017
Palma de Mallorca, Spain