Taking up the Commission’s objective of speeding up the processing of asylum applications of people not eligible for protection in the EU, with new safeguards for fundamental rights and a new proposal for financial support, the report on a ‘Common Procedure for International Protection’, drafted by French MEP Fabienne Keller (Renew Europe), was relatively well received on Tuesday 26 October by MEPs on the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties.
As a reminder, this Regulation presented by the Commission in September 2020 in its Pact on Migration and Asylum (see EUROPE 12566/1) proposes that Member States should be able to accelerate the processing of applications from persons who are clearly not in need of protection and whose negative decision on their asylum application would be coupled with an immediate return decision, within a maximum of 12 weeks for each procedure.
The French MEP, as she explained to her colleagues on Tuesday, intends to preserve this concern for efficiency and speed, but she also wants to “Europeanise” this work.
The MEP thus proposes that the centres where these border procedures will be carried out, which Member States will have the choice to place wherever they wish on their territory and not only at the external border, should be entirely “financed by the European budget”.
The MEP endorses the Commission’s proposal to speed up the processing of applications for applicants who are nationals or, in the case of stateless persons, formerly habitual residents of a third country for which the share of decisions granting international protection is lower than 20% of the total number of decisions adopted for that third country. She also proposes that this 20% threshold should apply in all circumstances, including in times of crisis or in cases of force majeure.
But exemptions are proposed to this border asylum procedure, for example for an applicant who would belong to a specific category of persons “for whom the low recognition rate cannot be considered as representative of their protection needs”.
Another change introduced is that while return rates of illegal immigrants remain low in the EU and poor cooperation on returns with some third countries is notorious, the MEP proposes that people from these same ‘recalcitrant’ countries on returns should not be directed to the return procedure at the border, but to the classic return system, as they have little chance of being readmitted by their country of origin.
The MEP also adds a series of safeguards, including a mechanism for independent monitoring of the practices of the competent authorities to ensure that fundamental rights and procedures are respected, and guidelines to be developed with the Member States and the Commission to focus on alternatives to deprivation of liberty, with detention as a measure of last resort. She suggests the use of house arrest in any given area rather than confinement to a standard structure.
EU agencies would also have a right of initiative to act on migratory pressure.
Reactions in committee on Tuesday were fairly calm, with French MEP Sylvie Guillaume (S&D) welcoming the fact that these procedures could be applied elsewhere in the EU. However, she deplored the fact that the text retains the principle of the legal fiction of non-entry (a migrant cannot be considered to be on EU soil until he or she has been authorised to do so), which risks increasing the use of detention.
The very principle of a border procedure with a system of different rights for the persons concerned also remains inadequate for Erik Marquardt (Greens/EFA, Germany) as such a procedure has already been shown “to create chaos” in the countries of first entry.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/3ChYJeP (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)