On Thursday 6 October, the Commission presented its ‘2022 Annual Report’ on migration and asylum, which takes stock of what has been done to take forward the 2020 ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’. In the report, the Commission calls on Member States to “make further progress towards a responsible and fair migration management system in the EU”.
The report, a sort of inventory of the Commission’s actions - legislative or otherwise - also looks at the reception of Ukrainian refugees since March 2022, with 4 million registrations under the Temporary Protection Directive, and takes stock of the situation on migration routes, with the Central Mediterranean migration route remaining the most frequently used, even though arrivals along the Eastern Mediterranean migration route have doubled compared to 2021, notably in Cyprus.
In terms of support for Member States under migratory pressure, the report looks at the various Commission missions or task forces set up to help countries such as Italy, Malta, Spain, Cyprus and Greece. A specific chapter is devoted to Cyprus, which has seen a 122% increase in irregular arrivals compared to 2021, mainly from Turkey via the ‘Green Line’.
The Commission also takes a look at the declaration of solidarity made by France in the first half of the year: at this stage, 13 Member States have voluntarily committed to relocate, but the Commission does not give any figures, whereas Paris’s informal objective was to reach 10,000 relocations over a year.
To date, some forty relocations from Italy have been agreed, but not all of them are effective yet, with several sources pointing to the extremely cumbersome administrative process.
The report goes on to list actions on returns, such as the appointment by the Commission in March of a Return Coordinator, whose added value is still being questioned by some Member States.
Finally, on the Pact, while the Commission seems to be pleased that things are moving forward, basing itself in particular on the roadmap that the European Parliament and the EU Council have signed to adopt the Pact by February 2024, discussions at Council level are still complex on the most important aspect of solidarity.
Indeed, if the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU has recently relaunched the reflections on the legislative aspect of solidarity in the field of migration and wishes to give guarantees to the European Parliament so that it can move forward in return on the ‘Screening’ and ‘Eurodac’ texts, many questions remain within the Member States on the concrete functioning of the solidarity mechanism or the scope of the concept of flexible responsibility.
It was therefore not certain on 6 October that the Presidency would be able to present more advanced ideas, or even proposed amendments, before the meeting of interior ministers on 14 October.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/3fz (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)