BRUSSELS: EU lawmakers and member state representatives will try on Monday to negotiate a pact reforming the bloc’s migration policies, a politically fraught issue that has raised alarm among refugee charities.
Just ahead of the talks, taking place on International Migrants Day, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson said an agreement would mean “safer and better managed migration, which is in the interest of all”.
The outline of the text being negotiated calls for the responsibility for arriving asylum-seekers to be shared across all 27 EU member countries — either by hosting quotas or contributing financially.
It also called for procedures to be streamlined so that unsuccessful applicants could be speedily deported.
The issue — and general policy approach — has taken on a harder political edge with the rise of nationalist anti-immigrant parties in several EU countries, including Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Negotiators’ minds are focused on reaching a workable deal that could be finalised and enacted before the term of the current European Parliament ends in June 2024.
Fifty-six charities that help migrants, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Caritas and Save the Children, have written an open letter saying the proposal “risks perpetuating discriminatory practices” and is unworkable.
“There is currently a major risk that the pact results in an ill-functioning, costly, and cruel system that falls apart on implementation and leaves critical issues unaddressed,” they said.
The commission put forward the current proposal for revising the bloc’s migration policies in September 2020 after an earlier effort in 2016 collapsed under a refugee influx crisis.
It keeps the existing principle under which the first EU country an asylum-seeker enters is responsible for their case. But to help countries experiencing a high number of arrivals — as is the case with Mediterranean countries Italy, Greece and Malta seeing many boat landings — a compulsory solidarity mechanism would be set up.
That would mean a certain number of relocations to other EU countries, or those countries refusing to take in migrants providing a financial or material contribution to the ones that do.
One subject under discussion is how compulsory relocations would work when a vessel — for instance one operated by a migrant charity — carries out a sea rescue and seeks to dock at the nearest safe port.