The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) is disappointed by the two reports presented on 26 October in the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties on the Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR) and the Regulation on Migration and Asylum Management (RAMM) (see EUROPE 12820/6, 12820/7).
In a post by its President, Catherine Woollard, ECRE considers that the draft APR “leaves intact the complex and unworkable Commission proposal. The efforts to reintroduce procedural guarantees are insufficient and the legislation would still create a complex procedural labyrinth, with many applicants subject to cumulative substandard procedures, in detention”, she writes.
But ECRE considers that the draft RAMM is even “worse” than the Commission’s initial proposal “with proposed amendments that would both reduce protection standards in Europe and further increase the responsibilities of the countries at the external borders. (...) It is a mystery as to why MEPs from southern Member States have agreed to this proposal, which goes against their countries’ priorities”, writes ECRE.
The report increases “detention options” and “removes most of the few positive changes proposed by the Commission”. It further shifts “responsibility to the borders”, and ECRE wonders whether this report, by proposing even worse alternatives, does not aim to force the countries of the South to accept the first text.
Link to ECRE: https://bit.ly/3CESOk4 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)