Today, the European Commission is revealing its new European Asylum and Migration Strategy, as well as a new EU Visa plan. Is this multiplication of migration management instruments an attempt to divert attention on the failure of the EU Migration Pact?
The new Strategy aims again at reinforcing externalization, cooperation with non-EU countries and border control. The new Visa plan aims at increasing the EU’s conditionality approach by linking even more visa issuance “to how closely third countries cooperate with the EU on readmission and migration management.”
Four of the six priorities set out in the Strategy focus on externalization: migration diplomacy (a nicer word for externalisation); strong EU borders; returns and readmission; and flexible funding.
“Migration diplomacy” = externalisation
The Strategy will increase cooperation with third countries on border management, returns and readmissions, foster so-called innovative solutions (such as “return hubs”) and reinforce the use of incentives and leverages, including visa and trade, to increase returns and readmissions.
EuroMed Rights will continue to denounce that EU cooperation with countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey – where grave human rights violations and violence against people on the move and their citizens happen daily and are widely documented – only reinforces the authoritarian regimes and crackdown on human rights.
For example, almost three years after the signing of the EU-Tunisia MoU, the situation of people on the move in Tunisia has dramatically deteriorated. As the EU has just disbursed the first EUR 1 billion installment in the framework of the EU-Egypt Strategic Comprehensive Partnership, Egypt is intensifying deportations of Sudanese and Syrians.
Since the EU deal, Mauritania significantly increased expulsions, police raids, violence and criminalization against migrants. Senegal will receive EUR 30 million from the EU to “enhance the border control and surveillance powers of the Senegalese security forces, raising serious concerns regarding the potential for human rights abuses”. Following the recent EU-Jordan Summit, Jordan will receive EUR 80 million in migration management equipment, without however information on how and for which equipment this money will be disbursed.
Failure of the EU Migration Pact
Since last year, the European Commission has been presenting a series of new reforms on migration, e.g. the Return Regulation, the EU list of “safe” countries of origin, the revision of the “safe” third country concept, which raise serious human rights concerns.
This multiplication of instruments and policies seems a clear attempt to divert attention on the unworkability of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, as EuroMed Rights and its members and partners have denounced since its presentation.
As denounced by civil society organisations, several challenges and concerns arise concerning the capacity of EU Member States to actually implement the Pact, in terms of legislation, systems and infrastructure in place, along with concerns related to a lack of transparency in the Member States’ national implementation plans, and a lack of CSOs engagement in the development of the plans.
In conclusion, the EU is continuing to outsource its responsibilities in terms of protection, reception, and procedural safeguards by reinforcing the security apparatuses of countries with very poor human rights records and fuelling a system of repression and criminalisation.
These policies have not been effective in the past and are unlikely to be effective in the future. They will only lead to making migratory routes more dangerous, thus increasing deaths and disappearances, as tragically shown by the latest deadly shipwreck in the Central Mediterranean last week when at least 50 people died and at least 380 other people who had left Tunisia by boat are still missing. Instead of increasing externalisation and border control, the EU and its Member States should implement truly human rights-based migration and asylum policies and open safe and legal pathways.