Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties gave a mixed reception on Thursday 2 September to the alternative impact assessment carried out by Parliament’s Research Service, EPRS, on the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’ presented by the Commission in September 2020.
While some MEPs asked the EPRS to further justify some of the criticisms, others saw the study as confirming their concerns, particularly those relating to the excessive use of detention of people arriving at the EU’s external borders.
The EPRS delivered a very severe analysis of the Commission’s proposals (see EUROPE 12778/1), focusing on four main texts (asylum and migration management, screening procedures, asylum procedures and crisis management instrument, and force majeure situations) and judging them overall ineffective and missing the most important target: to correct the current shortcomings of the European asylum system.
Their authors detailed, on Thursday 2 September, their main criticisms, such as the fact that the Commission did not sufficiently base its proposals on the real and current failings of the asylum system, which are largely due to the scattered implementation of the rules by the Member States, or the deficit of solidarity responses, with relocations that are too limited and insufficiently financed to be attractive, and a system of organised returns that does not respond to the real problems, which are the “motivation of the candidates for return and of the countries of origin”, said researcher G. N. Cornelisse.
This was met with mixed reviews, with German EPP member Lena Düpont saying that she did not “entirely agree” with the EPRS analysis, which gave “the impression that nothing is going to work; maybe it should have said what to do to make it work?”
For Italian MEP Pietro Bartolo (S&D), “the analysis confirms our fears about solving the current problems” and everything in the analysis gives the feeling that the proposals will “make things worse”, such as the so-called Dublin system with the criterion of the country of first entry, which will be reinforced. “There is a risk of over-reliance on detention”, the Italian MEP also said.
French MEP Fabienne Keller (Renew Europe) would have liked to see more details on some of the criticisms made, for example on border procedures, which are compulsory for people who come from a country with less than 20% of asylum recognition rate.
For Damien Carême (Greens/EFA, France) and Cornelia Ernst (The Left, Germany), this study is already the Pact’s “eulogy” and “shows that we have to repackage” these proposals. “Everything needs to be rewritten” said The Left member.
For Damien Carême, the question is therefore “whether we should negotiate and nitpick for years” on proposals that will make things worse and “solve nothing”.
The Commission defended itself on Thursday for not having based its decision on objective facts, saying it had instead relied on various statistics and feedback. And the new Eurodac Regulation, which includes the expansion of the database on asylum seekers, will be an improvement in this sense, as there are indeed some “hard to get” data.
However, the EPRS is not the only department to have given a severe analysis of the proposals. Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs (IPOL) has also produced a study at the request of the Committee on Civil Liberties in which it criticises nothing less than the intergovernmental preference given in the Pact and the disregard for Treaty Articles with a disproportionate role given to Home Affairs Ministers.
The proposals also draw on existing practices in Member States, such as accelerated border procedures, which have often led to “accelerated expulsions, illegal pushback, arbitrary detentions or criminalisation of asylum seekers and migrants”.
The analysis is also very harsh on the way the Commission wants to distinguish between irregular migrants and people eligible for asylum.
Link to the EPRS study: https://bit.ly/3zGkbIT
Link to the study by IPOL: https://bit.ly/3tgpAnF (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)