Speaking to Agence Europe on Wednesday 9 April, the day after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe voted on the resolution accompanying its report ‘Putting an end to collective expulsions of aliens’, Swiss Socialist Pierre-Alain Fridez welcomed the result (79 votes in favour, 44 against and 2 abstentions), but expressed concern at the attempts to block the vote, which began at the opening of the session on Monday 7 April.
Italian MP Catia Polidori (EPP - Forza Italia) called for the report to be referred back to committee, and German Socialist Frank Schwabe referred to “some rumours that there is a kind of cooperation of some groups here to go against this report”.
Rejected on Monday, this request was reintroduced - unsuccessfully - on Tuesday before the vote by Ukraine’s Dmytro Natalukha, spokesperson for the European Conservatives, Patriots & Affiliates group, who, during the debate, spoke out against “the weaponisation of international legal norms to undermine legitimate state sovereignty”.
These legislative twists and turns left their mark on Mr Fridez.
“We didn’t expect this”, he says. “It makes me wonder about the risk of one day seeing the Parliamentary Assembly vote against the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights”.
The Parliamentary Assembly’s report is based on Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 of this text, which formally prohibits collective expulsions of foreign nationals and stresses the importance of individual examination of situations.
To reject it would have been to go against the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.
“The instrumentalisation of migrants at the borders with Poland and the Baltic States was a factor with EPP MPs from these countries”, added Mr Fridez.
“We are taking the measure of this ‘hybrid war’, but this does not mean that people should lose their right to be identified, protected and included in an assessment process to be carried out, perhaps, with the support of the EU, because the number of applications is heavy to bear”.
With regard to the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’ adopted by the EU, the Resolution acknowledges that it is “a sign of the political will among European Union member States to take a consistent approach”, but insists on the importance of guarantees in the national implementation plans to avoid collective expulsions.
Link to the Resolution: https://aeur.eu/f/gcs (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)