The online counter for immigrants and refugees, which opened a week ago, has received half a hundred complaints, with most of them against the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA).
“We’ve had51complaintsto date,” mostly related to “lack of access to information or services” from AIMA, but there are also complaints of “racial or ethnic discrimination and psychological violence, lack of access to resources in services,” Raul Manarte, from the Humans Before Borders (HuBB) collective, which is part of the project, told Lusa.
The complaints on balcaodenuncia.pt came from various places, mostly Lisbon and Porto, but also Setúbal, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real, Viseu, Aveiro, Braga, Coimbra, Faro and Leiria.
In terms of nationalities, the portal has registered complaints from immigrants from Brazil, Cape Verde, India, Iran, Russia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Ukraine and Bangladesh.
On the day it was inaugurated, May 20, the portal’s promoters met with AIMA, at the institution’s request.
“They asked us to share the complaints directly” in order to try to resolve them, explained Raul Manarte.
The aim of the portal is to publish statistics on complaints but also to communicate with institutions if people identify themselves in the system
“The vast majority of our complaints have a name and contact details, they are not anonymous,” said Raul Manarte.
The aim of the project, which also includes groups of migrants and refugees and students from the Porto School of Education, is to “increase the social visibility” of the problems among the population and the media.
Each “refugee can leave their complaint, their account of what happened” and the “main objective is to compile this information and process it in an assertive way so that it can be accessible” to anyone who is interested.
The project, say the promoters, “aims to overcome accessibility barriers and collect, compile and disseminate incidents of abuse, mistreatment, neglect or general non-compliance through online reporting”.
The desk wants to “compile the reports received and turn them into public data” through social networks and collaboration with the media, to allow “civil society to have a more accurate view of the difficulties that the migrant and refugee population experiences in Portugal”.
In addition, this data “can be used in civic action campaigns, putting pressure on structures or decision-makers to take concrete steps to reduce or eradicate the occurrences”, say the promoters.
