Source: The Conversation – UK
At a time when the debate over migration is drawing a great deal of heat, Spain has stood out in Europe for its liberal stance. Six months ago, the government of Pedro Sánchez opened up a pathway to legal residency for hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants. So, when tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta on July 30, the uproar was not confined to Spain.
This came days after Spain’s supreme court had ruled that migrants stopped at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla, another Spanish enclave on the coast of Africa, could not simply be returned from whence they came. While many commentators blamed this ruling for the sudden dash for Ceuta, more than 95% of the migrants who entered on July 30 have since returned to Morocco via the land border.
Nonetheless, the events of July 30 stirred up a hornets’ nest in Spain, where the Sanchez government, which has a minority of seats in the Spanish parliament, is under severe pressure from conservative and far-right parties. Spain’s far-right Vox party, led by Santiago Abascal, has been running hot on the subject ever since.
As Deniz Torcu, an expert in globalisation at Spain’s IE university, notes, the footage of migrants surging past, or swimming around, barriers into Ceuta immediately changed the tone of the migration debate in Spain – and elsewhere in Europe. “The optics are a gift for Europe’s far right, and they know precisely what to do with it. They can lose every argument about the real numbers and still come out ahead, because their aim is to make the story of a welcoming Spain look foolish.”
Read more:
How the Ceuta border crossing incident immediately played into the hands of Spain’s far right
Spain has held Melilla and Ceuta since the 15th and 16th centuries respectively, despite being pushed out of the rest of north Africa over the years. Francisco Franco launched the Spanish civil war from Ceuta in 1936, having flown there from the Canary Islands where he was Spain’s military commander.
The two enclaves remain an open sore in relations between Spain and Morocco, explains Parvati Nair, a professor of Hispanic, cultural and migration studies at Queen Mary University of London. And the events of July 30 will not have made things any easier – Ceuta’s authorities have already accused its neighbour of deliberately loosening border controls on its side, something Morocco denies.
Nair charts the controversial history of Ceuta and Melilla as colonial hangovers which now play a key – and contested – role in the enforcement of Europe’s southern border.
Read more:
Ceuta and Melilla: how the colonial legacies of these cities have shaped migration in the region
This role, and the ability of the European Union generally to control its borders, are now the subject of intense debate for the EU’s 27 member states. An emergency video conference was held on August 4, prompted by a letter signed by 22 members including Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Denmark, which made a number of claims about shortcomings in EU border controls.
One was that domestic policies of countries such as Spain acted as “pull factors” for irregular migrants. Another was that the movement of such migrants through EU countries is being facilitated by the Schengen agreement, which provides for free movement of people through member countries. Karla Zeravcic and Marco Mauer, researchers at the European University Institute, point to problems with these assumptions as they relate to EU law.
West Bank violence, Gaza famine
The UN has reported that in the 300 days since the ceasefire in Gaza came into force last October, at least 300 children have been killed. It’s a shocking statistic which gives urgency to the latest roadmap to peace unveiled by the US president, Donald Trump, at the end of July.
But that deal now looks to be dead in the water after Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country would not withdraw its troops from the Palestinian enclave until Hamas is completely disarmed. Hamas has already said it will not disarm until Israel withdraws its military. So it’s stalemate – once again.
This was not unexpected, writes Julie Norman, whose book Gaza: The Dream and the Nightmare – co-authored with American political scientist Maia Carter Hallward – charts the enclave’s history and chronicles the devastation of the past three years of war. Norman has just returned from a month of fieldwork in the West Bank, where settler violence and land seizures are spiralling.
She believes that events in Gaza and the West Bank are “inextricably linked” – and that the likelihood of any peace deal in Gaza is far outweighed by the very real prospect of out-and-out conflict in the other, much larger Palestinian territory.
Read more:
How Israeli conduct in the West Bank could derail Donald Trump’s latest peace plan for Gaza
Stolen childhood
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and the Russian president’s commissioner for children’s rights, for the crime of unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.
Now, a disturbing report prepared for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has revealed the forcible indoctrination and militarisation of these children, and also children in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
The report’s authors, Stefan Wolff, Elīna Šteinerte and Hervé Ascensio, found detailed and distressing evidence of children being force-fed propaganda and given military-style training in schools which were deliberately preparing them to fight against their own country. This, they stress, is a crime under the Geneva Convention.
Donald Trump’s midas touch
It was revealed at the end of June that Donald Trump made US$2.2 billion (£1.63 billion) in the first year of his second presidential term. Much of this reportedly came through his investments in cryptocurrency, including the $TRUMP meme coin he launched days before his inauguration, which has since lost much of its value.
The revelations prompted much discussion about the rights and wrongs of a president doing business while in office. Historian Benjamin Quail, of Queen’s University Belfast, gives us a rundown of the financial fortunes of previous inhabitants of the White House, and finds that while it’s not unusual for a president to make a fortune after leaving office, Trump’s amassing of such a fortune as president is without precedent.
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Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/07/dash-for-ceuta-adds-heat-to-europes-migration-debate/