Human rights are not a prize for those we find convenient, nor a door that opens depending on who knocks. They are the last refuge for those who have lost everything.
These days we have seen images from Ceuta that should concern us all: people crammed together, streets turned into camps, dirt, and minors without any protection. Almost two months after the massive entry on July 30, when tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco, thousands continue to sleep in the open while reception centers are being expanded at forced march.
This is not about denying reality, much less about defending a lack of control. Adults who enter irregularly must be identified and registered; when their return is appropriate, it must be done with all guarantees, and anyone who commits a crime must be judged, regardless of their nationality. Defending human rights does not imply renouncing compliance with the law: it implies exactly the opposite.
With children, however, the issue is different. The law requires each situation to be studied individually and their best interests to be protected. They cannot be ordered to be returned as if they were packages without names and without stories. According to the Government's own data, there are more than fifteen hundred minors already identified in Ceuta and nearly a thousand who still sleep in the street.
Questions that deserve answers
I wonder why dignified facilities were not provided from the outset. The Government has approved a decree mobilizing more than three hundred million euros for Ceuta, validated in Congress in mid-September. The public has the right to know how it will be used: whether that money arrives on time or if it will arrive when the images have already served other purposes.
Because with public resources committed, it is worth asking why a proper camp was not immediately set up, with portable showers, drinking water points, latrines, and healthcare. Why are so many people allowed to remain lying on beaches and streets, without privacy and without being able to dignify themselves by using a service for their needs? Nothing justifies a human being living among garbage. That is abandonment, and abandonment is a violation of human rights.
Children have also been called invaders. They are children. We cannot allow such disqualifications.
The business of fear
Ceuta cannot face this situation alone, but it also cannot accept chaos as if it were inevitable. And I suspect that some are interested in maintaining these images of disorder: people on the ground, garbage, shouting. A perfect scenario to manufacture fear, to turn the suffering of others into a spectacle.
There are leaders who know perfectly well that hatred gathers more followers than empathy. That is why they speak of invaders instead of human beings, and generalize any crime to condemn an entire group.
And yet, when those fleeing the war in Ukraine arrived, Europe was the first to activate protection mechanisms, and millions of people were welcomed without their presence being used to fuel rejection. It was a just and necessary welcome. But I wonder why our sensitivity changes depending on skin color or origin.
Let's not forget that Spaniards were also emigrants. France, Mexico, and other countries welcomed those fleeing war and dictatorship. Among them, the children of Morelia: four hundred and fifty-six children of Republicans who in 1937 crossed the Atlantic alone, without their families, to escape violence. Someone, on the other side, decided to see them as children and not as a threat.
Empathizing is not justifying
Sexual assaults are very serious offenses, and those responsible must be judged, whether they are Spanish, Belgian, or Moroccan. But crimes are committed by specific individuals, not by a race or a religion. When a Spaniard commits a crime, no one claims that all Spaniards are criminals. When the accused is a foreigner, however, their origin makes headlines and suspicion falls on thousands of innocent people.
Empathizing is not justifying crimes. It means not using one person's crime to condemn an entire people. Some minors may be reunited with their families, others will remain under guardianship, and others will stay and will need protection and support. None can bear the crimes committed by adults.
It seems to have become fashionable to be cruel. Toughness is boasted about, lack of compassion is confused with bravery, and those who feel empathy are ridiculed. But what is truly brave is to defend security without despising the innocent, to demand justice without turning it into revenge, and not to take advantage of suffering to gain votes.
If cruelty becomes fashionable, indifference becomes a habit. And if a society gets used to the pain of others, it slowly begins to lose its soul.
Unprotected girls do not belong to any party. Scared children have no ideology. Those who use them to gain votes should remember that the responsibility of a country is measured by how it treats those who cannot defend themselves.
Let them not force us to choose between order and humanity: a democracy needs both. Neither racism nor lack of control, neither impunity nor abandonment. Because before borders or colors, we are talking about human beings.
I was struck by that sea full of floating shoes. I didn't see an invasion: I saw lives that arrived barefoot, poor people who had to lose everything before we lost the ability to look at them as human beings. Do not use chaos for political gain; use the means you have to help and do not become part of the problem. Let it not be fashionable to be bad people.
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