The way most Europeans encounter the ongoing refugee crisis is through a flood of news reports and statistics, death tolls, arrival counts, and tragic records reaching new highs. To create a moment of a more intimate, real connection between the two groups, Amnesty International arranged for a series of very simple meetings.
In them, two people—one refugee and one ordinary EU citizen—would sit down for four minutes and look each other in the eyes, without speaking. “Only when you sit down opposite a specific person and look into their eyes, you no longer see an anonymous refugee, one of the migrants, and notice the human before you,” Amnesty says.