On Wednesday 16 April, the European Commission amended the regulation establishing a common asylum procedure adopted in 2024 (see EUROPE 13318/1) to create a first common list of safe third countries of origin and to accelerate certain elements of the reform of the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’, which were not due to officially apply until mid-2026.
In particular, the amendments provide for the early application of the rule whereby all third-country nationals whose positive asylum recognition rate is below 20% throughout the EU will be processed under the accelerated asylum procedure.
It is also a question of bringing forward elements enabling Member States to designate safe third countries (countries of transit for migrants) and safe countries of origin with exceptions to allow “greater flexibility in defining the scope of safety assessments by excluding specific regions or clearly identifiable categories of individuals”.
“Together, these provisions offer means of managing likely unfounded applications efficiently while maintaining necessary legal safeguards”, explains the Commission.
With regard to the first common list of safe third countries of origin, the Commission first proposed in its regulation to consider all official EU candidate countries, in particular the five countries of the Western Balkans and Turkey, but also Georgia and Moldova, as safe countries of origin.
Three conditions are recalled here for countries not to be considered safe in principle, notably the existence of a war, which has excluded Ukraine from this list since 2022, or asylum recognition rates higher than 20%, and the fact that a country is subject to sanctions.
Its first formal list includes Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Colombia and Kosovo. These countries are already on the national lists of Member States that have designated their safe third countries of origin. However, five Member States, such as Spain, have not yet recognised Kosovo. This difference is taken into account in the regulation.
Kosovo’s separate treatment from the other Balkan countries is also justified by the fact that the country has not yet been recognised by the EU27 as an official candidate for EU membership.
This common list, which will become compulsory, will not prevent the EU27 from keeping their own lists if they have additional countries. The Commission intends to force those Member States that have not yet done so to apply accelerated procedures lasting less than three months for nationals of these seven countries and EU candidate countries.
However, they will still be able to challenge the accelerated procedure. The principle of compulsory individual examination also remains unchanged, meaning that nationals from these safe countries can still be granted asylum in the EU if their case warrants it.
In its proposal, the Commission explains the reasons for designating Egypt and Tunisia as safe countries of origin, even though these two countries are often in the crosshairs of human rights NGOs.
For Egypt, which is on the list of six Member States and has an asylum recognition rate of less than 4%, there is generally no risk of persecution or ill-treatment.
However, the Commission explains that “human rights challenges in Egypt remain significant, particularly in relation to the protection of fundamental freedoms, governance and the rule of law. However, in recent years, the political leadership in Egypt has taken steps putting greater emphasis on the importance of the respect for human rights. Egypt has intensified its engagement on human rights with the EU”.
For Tunisia, currently designated by 10 Member States as a safe country of origin, there is also generally no risk of persecution or ill-treatment, says the Commission. While it recognises that political activists, opponents and journalists may be oppressed and arrested, these acts do not reach a level that would justify describing the situation as one of “large scale, systematic repression”.
For Mélissa Camara, a French Greens/EFA MEP, “the Commission is once again showing its irresponsibility towards exiles. The list of countries on the table reveals a certain blindness to respect for the fundamental rights and values of the European Union. The cases of human rights violations in some of these countries no longer need to be demonstrated. It also contradicts the CJEU ruling of October 2024, according to which a country must be safe throughout its territory to be considered as such” (see EUROPE 13497/16).
The Commission had already proposed a common list of safe countries of origin in 2015, including Turkey, but the Member States and the European Parliament were unable to agree on it (see EUROPE 11385/1).
This new list, if adopted, will be dynamic, with countries potentially being added or removed depending on the situation. The Commission will present the list to the EU Council’s Asylum Working Party on 24 April.
Links to proposals: https://aeur.eu/f/gfs ; https://aeur.eu/f/gft (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)