As she announced in September (see EUROPE 13027/1), Sylvie Guillaume (S&D, French)—the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the reform of Schengen, the area of free movement—no longer wants the reform that the European Commission laid on the table last December to address issues regarding the instrumentalisation of migrants, which have no place in this project in her opinion.
The French MEP also believes that the European Commission’s proposal needs to be improved; in her view, it has only bowed to Member States’ demands to increase controls at internal Schengen borders by creating new grounds for reinstating such measures.
The elected representative will present her 70-page report to the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties on Thursday, 17 November. Some observers are already expecting difficult discussions with the Council of the EU—the French MEP’s positions being described as “tough” by a source close to the dossier.
The European Commission’s targeted reform was aiming to simultaneously respond not only to situations of instrumentalisation of migrants, such as those practised by Belarus at the end of 2021, and to uncoordinated internal border closures during the pandemic but also to the interminable increase in internal border controls; a handful of countries have, for example, been carrying out continuous controls since 2015. The reform also sought to give Member States additional means to combat unauthorised movements of migrants by creating a return procedure between neighbouring countries.
Sylvie Guillaume is far from pleased with all these things, as she explains in the explanatory statement.
With regard to the provisions on instrumentalisation, the rapporteur explains that she “prefers to remove them from the text since, on the one hand, they serve a geopolitical goal with limited relevance for the rules governing the good functioning of the Schengen area and, on the other hand, the Commission has made a separate, specific proposal for a Regulation on this subject, which should address all elements linked to that concept.”
Furthermore, migration does not, in and of itself, constitute “‘a serious threat to internal security.’ As such, [the rapporteur] does not agree with the introduction of the concept of large-scale unauthorised movements of third-country nationals”, which would make it possible to reintroduce internal border controls. This criterion has thus disappeared from the report.
The rapporteur also prefers to delete the new internal return procedure (Article 23a) and the amendments to the Return Directive. “It cannot be the role of the Schengen Borders Code to resolve problems that have arisen in the stalled reform of the EU’s asylum and migration policy,” argues the MEP.
While the European Commission’s proposal on responding to pandemic-type crises appears to be more satisfactory to her, the MEP adds a few clarifications, for example, on consulting the European Parliament when developing a regulation that sets out restrictions on travel from third countries to the EU. Consulting the European Parliament has generally been added throughout the report.
While she also considers the fact that the European Commission made the terms for using internal border control measures more strict, especially where they are prolonged, and reinforced the justifications for and evaluations of such measures to be a positive development, she believes there is still room for improvement.
As a result, she wants to shorten the time limits after which an evaluation of these internal border controls is necessary. She thus proposes that a [Member] State intending to prolong an internal control measure provide a risk assessment after three months, not six.
In addition, where a Member State intends to renew internal border control for a period longer than six months, the European Commission is required to give its opinion on the necessity and proportionality of the control.
For threats described as ‘foreseeable’, she also suggests that internal border control can be reintroduced for a maximum period of three months, as opposed to six in the European Commission’s text.
In addition, where a serious threat to public policy or internal security persists beyond that period, the Member State may prolong internal border controls for renewable periods of up to three months, as opposed to six in the European Commission’s text.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/42i (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)