The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called on Wednesday 15 September for EU Member States to speed up work on the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’, presented in September 2020 and on which they are moving too slowly and “painfully”.
Referring to the events of recent months on the Lithuanian border with Belarus, but also on the Latvian and Polish borders, the President considered that the Pact provides for “everything required” to manage asylum and migration issues and to respond to what she called a “hybrid threat” from the Minsk regime. “A hybrid attack to destabilise Europe” von der Leyen added, “which we will not tolerate”.
In this context, “all Member States have an interest in building a European system”, whereas the “opponents” of the EU exploit precisely this lack of a common system.
“Now is the time to develop a European policy on migration management. I call on the Member States to speed up the process”, said Ms von der Leyen, convinced that, despite “differing views, we are not so far from common ground”.
“It’s a question of trust. Trust between Member States. Trust as Europeans in our ability to manage migration”, said the President, considering that the Pact, although much criticised, presented a “humane and balanced response” to the various challenges.
The EU, she said, must act “to stem irregular migration”, but also “to offer refuge to the” most vulnerable people forced to flee.
This was criticised by Greens/EFA group co-chair Philippe Lamberts (Belgium), who attacked the “inhumanity” of Member States, whose main concern was to send people back to Afghanistan and avoid any influx of refugees into the EU.
For Iratxe Garcia Perez, the Spanish chair of the S&D group, the Afghan crisis shows above all that it is time to be “courageous” and to go beyond the principle of unanimity in order to make progress on the Pact.
Link to the speech: https://bit.ly/3lrVjyL (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)