In mid-November, MEPs in the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) will finally be asked to vote on the revision of the Eurodac Regulation, which was presented together with the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’. The date was initially envisaged for 30 September, but political meetings between the shadow rapporteurs are still planned.
The European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties will not meet on 30 September either and the reports on the Pact, which were also planned for 30 September, will therefore also be postponed until October.
On Eurodac, the office of the Spanish rapporteur, Jorge Buxadé Villalba (ECR), reported at the end of the week that regular progress was being made with the other rapporteurs, although they acknowledged that there were still several political points to be settled in October.
Contacted by EUROPE on 10 September, Saskia Bricmont (Belgium), the Greens/EFA shadow rapporteur, expressed her deep concerns both about the form - the fact that the Commission has reopened a text that had already been agreed in trilogue in the context of the former ‘Asylum Package’, but without being consolidated “or made public”, and the timing chosen by the rapporteur - but also about the substance.
She is critical of the rapporteur’s plan to quickly complete the examination of this text, which is being presented as technical, whereas it has links with other texts in the Pact, particularly with regard to the regulation on the filtering of migrants, and is, on the contrary, highly political.
On the substance, she considers that the revision poses great dangers for fundamental rights, in particular those of minors, who, from the age of 6, will also be obliged to provide their biometric data in this Eurodac database. The rapporteur’s proposed interoperability with Frontex, which will also be able to access Eurodac data, also worries her, as does the possible use of coercion to collect this data.
Ms Bricmont supports the recent NGO request to delay the vote (see EUROPE 12787/25), but she says that this request is unlikely to succeed as she does not have a majority in the LIBE Committee. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)