As announced at the end of 2019, the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament presented its plan for the European reform of asylum and migration policy on Tuesday 14 January in Strasbourg. This plan is a contribution to the future Pact on this subject as promised by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The pact, which contains six pillars, was submitted by the head of the RE group, Romanian Dacian Cioloș, and his German and Dutch colleagues, Jan-Christoph Oetjen and Malik Azmani, to the Vice-President responsible for Protecting Our European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas, and the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson.
“The crisis of 2015 has shown that European asylum policy is not up to the challenge”, explained Mr Cioloș, for whom the question to be answered is not ‘more or less migration?’, but ‘is it possible to manage migration to the EU in a “proactive” and “orderly” way?’
The Renew Europe group’s pact contains rather conventional measures: - the international dimension of immigration, through dialogue and partnerships with non-Member States; - an asylum policy that works with reception centres at all points of irregular arrival in the EU, immediate registration of arrivals, compulsory security checks and a mechanism for relocating people with a good chance of being granted asylum within the EU; - a ‘sustainable’ return and readmission policy for migrants who are not eligible for international protection; - well-managed external borders (e.g. through interoperability of databases) that allow for an area without internal border controls; - coordinated European action on legal labour migration, possibly based on the Canadian model, and finally; - a sustainable approach to the integration of migrants.
Link to the document: https://bit.ly/2TkA1GK (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)