UK threatens Eritrean entry ban over return dispute
The Visa as Lever
The plan requires that the slow, mutual, largely unwritten business of returning a person to the state that once claimed him be replaced by an explicit rule: cooperate, or your nationals will not be admitted. But return is not a transaction between two governments so much as a series of small acts of recognition. An official has to look at a man without papers and agree that he belongs to them, and the people who know how such recognition is actually obtained were not consulted.
The question, then, is not whether the Home Secretary is entitled to press the Government of Eritrea. The strongest version of the case says she plainly is. States are expected to readmit their own nationals. A country that will not do so cannot fairly expect its citizens to travel freely into one that must otherwise keep them indefinitely. Leverage is the ordinary grammar of diplomacy, and the visa is among the few instruments a government holds that costs it almost nothing to use. I do not dismiss this. It describes correctly what the obligation is. It misdescribes what the obligation consists of when it is carried out.
“Refusing to co-operate” is a phrase that imagines co-operation as a switch, held in a minister’s hand in Asmara and simply left in the off position. In practice, co-operation is something done at a desk. A consular officer confirms an identity from a village name, a parent’s name, a dialect, a recollection of which school stood where. This is knowledge held by particular people and exercised at their discretion. It is also exercised under the eye of a government that has long regarded those who left, many of them escaping an indefinite national service, as something nearer to deserters than to citizens awaiting repatriation. It is not obvious that such a government wishes to take them back. Nor is it obvious that what London calls refusal is not, from Asmara’s side, a considered indifference that no penalty on visas will disturb.
The ban therefore bears down on the wrong place. The officials whose judgement return requires will not themselves be inconvenienced. The Eritreans who still pass through the United Kingdom’s front door are a different population altogether. They are the student, the businessman, the relative with a sponsor’s letter. Their government may notice their absence only as a modest loss of remittance and prestige. The rule has been aimed at a state and will be felt chiefly by a family.
What the practice itself suggests is less dramatic and more laborious. Returns that have worked anywhere have rested on accumulated working relations between particular officials, on documentation arrangements built case by case, and on something offered as well as threatened. None of this fits in a press statement. All of it is the substance of the thing the statement claims to want.
Somewhere in an Asmara consulate, a clerk is looking at a photocopied face and deciding whether he recognises it. No announcement from Westminster has entered that room.