The proposed EU Migration Pact solves nothing and is simply unworkable says EuroMed Rights as Ministers attend conference on migration flows.
Unworkable and inhumane. These are the key findings of EuroMed Rights’ latest report on the new EU Pact on Asylum and Migration. Published during the Ministerial Conference on the management of migration flows, the report proposes a full, consistent interpretation of the possible effects of the new Pact on the EU’s internal and external policies and practices.
No country of first arrival would benefit from the proposed border procedure rules. By analysing arrival data for 2020, the report shows how Spain and Italy would respectively have to multiply by 6 and 7 times their number of formal and informal detention facilities should the EU Pact rules be implemented. Under these rules, in a situation of crisis similar to that of 2015, Greece would have to multiply by 34 its detention facilities.
The relocation solution already proposed in the 2015-2020 European Agenda on Migration demonstrates how the current proposal enunciated in the Pact cannot work. Under the 2015 plan, Italy and Greece were respectively able to relocate only one-third of the total number envisioned. Regarding “solidarity”, several member states (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) simply refused to relocate asylum seekers at the time while others (Austria, Bulgaria and Slovakia) took a much lower percentage than envisioned. This scenario could worsen under the new Pact proposal with the introduction, under the concept of “solidarity”, of return sponsorship and support for externalisation policies as an alternative to relocation.
The report also underlines how the EU Pact would lead to the dismantling of virtuous systems of diffuse reception by limiting asylum space and denying the fundamental assessment of migrants’ and asylum seekers’ vulnerabilities. Declaring that there will be “no more Morias” [camps] doesn’t magically make all the Morias disappear, and calling “solidarity” a system whose primary goal is to return as many migrants as possible, won’t make it genuinely solidary.
“The proposed implementation of the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration not only shows the inhumane disdain for the lives of migrants and asylum seekers but also the complete disregard for the situation faced by countries of first arrival. The Pact is nothing but a communication exercise which only worsen an already disastrous human rights situation” declared Wadih Al-Asmar, President of EuroMed Rights.