Return to Ethiopia | A Media Treatment Medley
Since March 1, 2018, Ethiopians whose asylum requests are rejected may be returned to their country against their will. The Ethiopian government signed a readmission agreement with the European Union, which was subsequently extended to Switzerland. This change jeopardizes the stay in Switzerland of at least 300 Ethiopian refugees. Seized by the differentiated media treatment of the news by the French-speaking Swiss dailies1] In early May 2018, Le Comptoir des médias analyzed this topic, particularly with media engineering students (HEIG VD). In French-speaking Switzerland, most dailies reprinted a dispatch from the Swiss Telegraphic Agency (ATS), while 24 heures conducted specific editorial work. The impact of these differences on public understanding is far from insignificant.
A majority of Western Swiss media outlets have reproduced information from the ATS dispatch. This dispatch states that among the 300 people concerned by deportation to Ethiopia is «the former radical imam of the An'Nur mosque in Winterthur, sentenced last November to 18 months in prison suspended, notably for incitement to crime and violence.» The man fled after his conviction but was apprehended in Germany. He will be returned to Switzerland before being deported to Ethiopia. The case had been widely covered by the press. However, it's easy to draw hasty conclusions. How many readers risk conflating the other 299 individuals with the actions of this single man, thereby perceiving them all as potential threats to Switzerland?
Most newspapers have also picked up the rest of the ATS dispatch announcing that the State Secretariat for MigrationSEM) is considering the possible lifting of provisional admissions for 3,200 Eritrean refugees, judging that returning to their country would no longer be as risky for these exiles. However, beyond the geographical proximity of these two nations, nothing connects the two pieces of information: neither the geopolitical realities nor the administrative measures envisioned by the SEM (i.e., the possibility of sending people back against their will to Ethiopia on one hand, and revoking the legal status of Eritreans in Switzerland on the other). Is this a red herring? The exercise conducted with media engineering students showed that, at first, they did not notice that the dispatch concerned two different countries.
It's all in the angle of the article.
The tone is noticeably different in how the newspaper processed the news. 24 hours titled: «Asylum, Switzerland's Strange Agreement with Ethiopia.» Relaying an investigation by the Bundle and of Daily Advertiser, the article reveals that the agreement provides not only for a significant sum of money paid to Ethiopia, but also for exchanges of information with the Ethiopian secret services. It is clear that this represents a risk for opponents of the regime and therefore a potential threat to the integrity of individuals: when they submit their asylum applications, they must be able to rely on the authority not disclosing the information provided. This aspect is fundamental to respecting the right of asylum.
Make connections, but which ones?
Over the past two years, Switzerland has been repeatedly forced to compensate individuals who were tortured after being deported to their countries of origin. Currently, suspicions of similar cases are being reported concerning Sudanese nationals recently deported [2].
From then on, the two pieces of news combined in the ATS dispatch, namely the resumption of deportations to Ethiopia and the favorable reassessment of the human rights situation in Eritrea, perhaps have only one thing in common: that one day Switzerland may have to apologize for them.
As we read these different articles, our concern to decipher the media is reaffirmed: the differentiated treatment of the same news leads to various apprehensions of reality.
Our analysis concerns the daily newspapers: ArcInfo, La Liberté, Le Journal du Jura, swissinfo and 24 heures
2 – Read the ODAE brief on this topic « Despite the mobilization, Switzerland carries out a deportation by special flight to Sudan » from 05/03/2018
GIADA DE COULON
WORKING WITH MEDIA TREATMENT
Fact-checking, statistical decryption, and terminology: the activity conducted with Romand journalists by the Comptoir des médias is increasingly interesting public administrations and higher education institutions.
The publication of our Memo[s] for journalists on asylum and migration in 2017 gave the Comptoir notoriety and credibility among audiences other than just journalists, which delights us.
We were thus asked to conduct several workshops and presentations on the media coverage of asylum news. Our goal is to raise awareness of the need to approach information with a critical eye, to understand some of its pitfalls, but also to highlight the crucial role that the media plays in our democracy.
