Member States’ experts meeting on Thursday 16 February in the EU Council’s Strategic Committee on Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA) will again discuss how to take forward the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’ and will specifically address the issue of border procedures.
These procedures are part of the elements of the concept of responsibility together with the concept of solidarity, both of which form the backbone of the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR, ex-Dublin).
While the Swedish Presidency considers that the work on the solidarity aspect (see EUROPE 13102/16) is progressing well, it proposes to the Member States, in a note dated 10 February, to focus on the modalities of a “mandatory but adaptable” responsibility, designed with “simplicity, practicability and predictability in mind”.
The concept of adaptable responsibility is based on three pillars: - fast and effective migration procedures at the external borders to determine who can stay and who should be returned to their country of origin or transit; - rules on responsibility determination; - the fight against secondary movements.
Focusing here on border procedures, which are mandatory above a certain threshold of non-recognition of asylum applications under the Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR), the Presidency wants to know how this obligation can be complied with by Member States both in a normal situation and in the case of larger arrivals at the external border.
The note presents several options for the mandatory border procedure, including a system based on a maximum threshold for the recognition rate of asylum claims by nationality to quickly identify, during the examination, those who should be subject to this procedure, as they have little chance of obtaining asylum. The Czech Presidency proposed two options, recalls Stockholm: a threshold of 20%, as in the Commission’s proposal, or up to 30%.
“The higher the threshold, the greater the risk the examination would be complex, and would as a result clog up the available processing capacity”, writes the Swedish Presidency.
Furthermore, “the higher the threshold, the higher the number of applications to be processed at the border, which would defeat the purpose of having a fast and sustainable system adapted to operational realities”.
The note also asks about possible additional safeguards to ensure rapid processing of applications in the border procedure and to provide predictability, including the idea of an ‘adequate capacity’ concept. This concept would identify the capacity needed to carry out the border procedure on an annual basis.
The note suggests several options for determining the ‘adequate capacity’ of a Member State: - establish an adequate capacity for each Member State on an ad hoc basis with assessment by the Commission and confirmation by the EU Council on an annual or multi-annual basis; - identify a minimum adequate capacity for the whole EU, which could be used as a reference for determining the adequate capacity for each Member State.
As with the solidarity mechanism, a volume identifying the ‘minimum adequate annual capacity’ for the Union would be set.
The third part of the discussion focuses on situations of high arrivals at the external borders and the flexibility in the application of the border procedure, which could be reserved for nationalities with the highest rates of return to their country of origin and on the ‘solidarity’ measures offered to frontline countries that have reached their maximum processing capacity.
The Presidency takes up here the possibility of relocations so that the border procedure is carried out in another Member State or the possibility for a country under pressure to apply the border procedure only to a smaller part of the arrivals, with a temporary lowering of the nationality threshold or a temporary suspension of this procedure in certain cases.
Link to the note: https://aeur.eu/f/5bu (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)