Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) gave a lukewarm welcome on Wednesday 26 January to the European Commission’s proposals revising the Schengen Borders Code and establishing a new Police Cooperation Code (see EUROPE 12853/1).
These create a common decision mechanism for introducing internal controls in times of pandemic or multi-country threats, create a framework for the right of Member States to introduce internal controls with an increased demand for justification, and allow them to adapt the right to asylum or return procedures in cases of instrumentalisation of migrants. There are also provisions to allow national police, through joint patrols, to return irregular migrants to the neighbouring Member State.
In the presence of Monique Pariat, Director General of the European Commission’s DG HOME (Home Affairs), the MEPs in turn asked for clarification on the definition of instrumentalisation, on the actual means at the Commission’s disposal to ensure the relevance of internal border controls. Some considered that the reforms were ultimately aimed at legalising the practices of migrant pushbacks and the violation of migrants’ rights already observed in certain countries.
This is what Dutch MEP Tineke Strik (Greens/EFA) found regrettable, as she believes that the reform package validates certain countries’ practices - notably Poland, Lithuania and Latvia - of “violating” their rights. She also believes that the proposals legalise pushbacks, which Ms Pariat denied, assuring that there is no provision to allow such practices.
She also assured that the external border crossing points, in the context of instrumentalisation, were to remain open and that these countries were obliged to receive the asylum applications lodged.
The Commission representative was also questioned by Bulgarian MEP Elena Yoncheva (S&D) on the potentially unlimited nature of certain border controls, possible for up to two years with a Commission opinion after 18 months. Commission Vice-President Margarítis Schinás had explained in December that the Commission could accept that these controls, if necessary, could go beyond two years. This seemed to be refuted by Monique Pariat on Wednesday, when she said that the Commission would intervene after this two-year period with an infringement proceeding.
The Director General also seemed to downplay the impact of country-to-country returns of irregular migrants, explaining that this is a possibility reserved for joint police patrols (proposed in the Police Code of 8 December) and yet taken up by the new Article 23a of the Schengen Borders Code, authorising Member States to conclude new bilateral agreements with each other to carry out such returns from one Member State to another.
On 27 January the LIBE coordinators are due to discuss and possibly decide whether to allocate this report, which is contested among the groups and has so far been held by the S&D, together with the report on the new regulation on the instrumentalisation of migrants, which is part of the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)