Brussels, 13/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean (PA-UfM) held its annual session in Lisbon on Tuesday 12 May. This year, the session was devoted to “immigration, asylum and human rights in the Euro-Mediterranean region”. Little news has been given about the results of the session - except for a new acting presidency taking over and a statement from the presidents of the parliaments urging the member states to take action against the uncontrolled flow of migrants.
Morocco has thus taken the relay from Portugal as the rotating president of the PA-UfM for a one year mandate. The president of the Moroccan chamber of representatives, Rachid Talbi Alami, replaces Maria da Assuncao, the president of the Portuguese assembly.
The PA-UfM is a common structure which brings together European parliamentarians (European Parliament President Martin Schulz is a permanent member of the bureau) alongside the president of a national parliament of an EU member state on behalf of national parliaments (Portugal in the current case), a parliament of a country from the Eastern Mediterranean (Jordan) and Western Mediterranean (Morocco).
The day before the plenary, a meeting of the presidents of national Euro-Mediterranean parliaments published a statement. One of its recommendations (addressed to the EU a day before the meeting in Brussels on immigration) calls on the EU “to study how to address the refugee crisis, including the possibility of receiving more refugees from conflict areas, with a fair distribution of responsibility, in a regulatory framework with which all the member states [would] agree, and based on the principle of solidarity”. The PA-UfM calls in particular for “greater flexibility from the EU member states in applying the discretionary clauses of the Dublin Regulation on the state responsible for decisions on asylum applications”. (Fathi B'Chir)