Brussels, 13/03/2000 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, the European Parliament will broach the problem of asylum-seekers and migrants in the EU, by discussing the report by Jorge Salvador Hernandez Mollar (Spanish, EPP) on the activities of the high-level "Asylum and Migration" Working Group. The Council's Group was instructed to draw up action plans concerning the main countries of origin or transit of asylum-seekers and migrants, and last October's Extraordinary European Council of Tampere extended that mandate. So far, the Working Group has worked on the following target countries: Albania (for which there is now an interim report), Iraq, Afghanistan and neighbouring regions, Morocco, Somalia, Sri Lanka.
According to Hernandez Mollar, the Group should take advantage of the extension of its brief to gradually propose measures for other countries and regions (which was, moreover, asked of it at the Tampere summit), countries and regions that should be identified "by duly involving the European Parliament and governmental and non-governmental institutions most concerned". The Group should also examine how to intensify cooperation in this field with countries candidates for EU membership, says the rapporteur. Recalling that the General Affairs Council had asked of the High Level Group for an evaluation of the necessary financial means to implement action plans, Mr. Hernandez Mollar notes that the Group's Chair had declared "before the relevant Parliamentary Committee that the figure for the budgetary requirements stemming from measures decided on was not one of the Group's primary tasks". Yet, the MEP stresses, such an evaluation is indeed necessary, as of the 108 measures proposed by the Group (27 for Afghanistan. 24 for Somalia, 23 for Sri Lanka, 18 for Morocco and 16 for Iraq), 70 have financial implications, and only 30 may rest on existing availability in the budget headings concerned (essentially, "emergency assistance" and "human rights and democracy in developing countries" headings). Under these conditions, the rapporteur proposes that, in the EU 2001 budget, a new budget heading be included for cooperation with third countries in matters of justice and home affairs, especially regarding immigration.
At a general level, the rapporteur considers that the fact of finding, in the High-Level Group's report, comparative data on immigration and asylum is an "excellent thing", but stresses that the "ground should be cleared of half-spoken truths and half-unspoken truths on the causes of mass immigration". In addition, he regrets that the great majority of measures should be "directed towards the management of illegal immigration and organising its suppression", whereas only "a small minority of measures directly concern the integration into the society of the Fifteen of nationals from the targeted countries". The action plans have thus "not attained an optimal equilibrium" between "security and integration", he states. According to him, the process of later drawing up action plans should pay special attention to the following aspects: