Eight years after the migratory wave from Syria and Iraq that blew up the European asylum system, the European Union yesterday reached an agreement on the new Migration Pact that toughens the conditions of access and opens the door to imprisoning migrants. migrants with few options to obtain protection in centers located on the border in order to decongest the asylum system and reserve the resources for cases that in theory have a better chance of being approved.
Discontent with the immigration situation has given wings to far-right parties across the continent in recent years, and fear that their discourse that the EU has lost control would prevail in the European Parliament elections in June 2024 has served as a powerful incentive to close an agreement this week, in time to be ratified before the end of the legislature. With only ten days left until the end of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the Union, the Government thus marks an important achievement in its list of successes of the semester, although NGOs disagree about the effects of the reform and warn that it will lead to more arrests.
The expected white smoke arrived at eight in the morning yesterday, when the negotiators of the Council (the Spanish presidency) and the European Parliament had already been meeting uninterruptedly for 30 hours. “Immigration is a common European challenge and this decision will allow us to manage it together,” celebrated the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who in 2020 presented a plan based on five legislative measures to address the challenge globally. the most “emblematic” proposal of his mandate.
The Spanish presidency has sought a balance between the need for “solidarity” of the states with external borders on the front line of the migration phenomenon and the “responsibility” asked of them by the internal countries, the final destination of many migrants, to stop secondary movements. in the EU.
The Migration Pact toughens the conditions of access to community territory through stricter entry controls, which will include the taking of biometric data, also for children over six years of age. The goal is to more quickly identify people with little chance of receiving protection. If the country of arrival provides for it, these migrants may be transferred to closed reception centers, so that if their asylum claims are rejected they can be deported more quickly.
The period to resolve cases is reduced to six months. One of the last obstacles in the negotiation was the repeal in these cases, or in crisis situations, of the special protection provided for in the regulations for minors and families with children. At this point, in the end, the Council’s vision has prevailed over that of the European Parliament and there will be no special treatment in these cases, although an independent supervision mechanism will be put in place to assist these groups.
The principle of the Dublin regulation by which the country of arrival must register and process the migrant’s asylum application is complemented by a flexible solidarity mechanism that will apply when a Member State is overwhelmed in order to distribute migrants between the different EU countries proportionally. The objective is to relocate at least 30,000 immigrants per year, but governments that do not want to participate in the distribution of immigrants have the alternative of making a financial contribution (20,000 euros per assigned and rejected immigrant).
Mandatory relocation was already attempted in 2016, in the midst of the asylum crisis, but Hungary, Poland and other countries refused to accept it, which opened a deep gap between Angela Merkel’s Germany and the Eastern countries that for years turned the debate on a politically toxic issue, hence the lack of progress.
“Moria, Calais, Lampedusa are everything we don’t like. Everything that testifies to the lack of Europe, the cost of the lack of Europe. For many years, migrants, refugees, islands, local communities and the EU as a whole have suffered from the lack of Europe, from the lack of a comprehensive migration and asylum policy,” the Vice President of the Commission, Margaritis, declared at a press conference. Schinas, responsible for the original proposal. “In the future, day-to-day migration management in Europe will be characterized by efficient procedures and effective solidarity,” she said.
The governments of Germany and Italy, with disparate interests in this dossier, also applauded the agreement, but the verdict of the NGOs is much more negative. “The new European Migration Pact will repeat the mistakes of the past and aggravate their consequences. There is a great risk that it will result in a defective, expensive and cruel system that will fall apart as soon as it is attempted,” they criticize in an open letter published this week by 50 NGOs, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Caritas and Save the Children.
The effects of the reform will take years to be seen, but the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, defended that it puts in place “a fair system with those who seek protection, firm with those who are not eligible and firm with those who exploit the most vulnerable.” . Negative or defeatist speeches about the pact, she criticized, “give a platform to those who do not want it to work,” such as extreme right-wing parties, which reject it.
