After more than three years of intense negotiations, the European Parliament finally passed the European Union’s flagship migration plan earlier this month. In a series of 10 separate votes, MEPs approved the Pact on Migration and Asylum’s six regulations, three recommendations and one directive governing how asylum-seekers and migrants are dealt with when they arrive at EU borders, and how responsibility for the processing, accommodation and relocation of asylum applicants is to be shared by member states.
The impetus for creating a set “of collective and predictive rules around migration” to replace the current ad hoc state-by-state arrangements dates back almost a decade to the migrant crisis of 2015, when an unprecedented 1.3 million displaced people attempted to enter the EU, largely as a consequence of the Syrian civil war. Since 2013, EU migration policy has been governed by the Dublin III regulation, which stipulates that asylum claims be processed in the country of first entry. This rule disproportionately affected member states on the southern periphery of the bloc such as Italy, Malta and particularly Greece, which was completely overwhelmed by the arrival of migrants during the 2015 crisis. To create a more equitable arrangement, the European Commission tried to introduce compulsory refugee quotas across the bloc, but several Eastern European countries, most notably Hungary and Poland, refused to apply them. The scheme was eventually abandoned in 2020, and negotiations began on the migration and asylum pact.
In the European Parliament, the measures were passed with the support of the center-right EPP group, the center-left Socialists, Democrats and Greens group and the liberal Renewal group. But they enjoyed smaller margins of victory than originally expected, after staunch opposition by more than 160 rights organizations succeeded in persuading some center-left MEPs to vote against the deal.
The final agreement came after what Camille Le Coz of the Migration Policy Institute described as years of “highly politicized negotiations on an issue over which Europe is still tearing itself apart.” Indeed, fierce disagreement in the form of loud protests and heated debates was heard in the chamber itself before the vote. For far-left MEPs, the pact represents an abandonment of “European values of compassion and human dignity,” while far-right members believe the plan fails to properly crack down on irregular arrivals, which last year reached their highest level since 2016.
European leaders have been spinning the pact as a balanced and fair compromise, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz describing the deal “as an historic, indispensable step for the EU.” But rights groups have been scathing in their condemnation. Human Rights Watch decried the agreement as a deterrence-based approach that has “been proven to be both ineffective and abusive,” while Amnesty International predicted that the reforms would increase both human rights violations and the suffering of migrants. The European Council on Exiles and Refugees went so far as to describe the changes as “byzantine in their complexity and Orban-esque in their cruelty.”
Compounding the moral and legal controversies surrounding the EU’s new migration policy is the vexed issue of implementation, as not all states can be expected to fully apply the complex new arrangements.
Though such statements may verge on the hyperbolic, there is substantial merit in the arguments put forward by NGOs that the pact violates the spirit and probably the letter of Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which established the universal right to asylum. Among the pact’s controversial provisions is the creation of border reception centers to fast-track asylum applications and speed up deportations, where children as young as six will be subjected to fingerprinting and facial recognition technology. If past experience in other Western countries is any guide, these facilities will likely be underfunded, overcrowded de facto detention centers. Human Rights Watch anticipates they will provide “substandard accelerated asylum procedures that strip migrants of safeguards such as legal aid available under normal procedures,” with all the potential for human rights abuses that this implies.
The agreement also provides for the removal of some asylum-seekers to non-EU countries deemed to be safe, effectively normalizing the externalization of migrant policy and legitimizing the plans of individual member states to evade their responsibility toward asylum-seekers by farming them out to non-EU countries. The far-right government of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni has already concluded one such deal with Albania. For Malin Bjork, a Swedish MEP and former EU rapporteur on refugee resettlement, the removal measure clearly “undermines the individual right to seek asylum in Europe,” thus violating the universality principle of Article 14.
Perhaps most egregious in terms of potential violations of international law is the so-called crisis regulation. Any country experiencing a “mass influx” of migrants—a term not precisely defined in the pact and presumably open to the interpretation of individual member states—has the right to “derogate from key human rights obligations.” According to Amnesty International, these exemptions risk breaching member states’ international obligations under the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention.
Compounding the moral and legal controversies surrounding the pact is the vexed issue of implementation. The new arrangements are far more complex than any iteration of the Dublin Agreement, and not all states can be expected to fully apply them. Both Ireland and Denmark enjoy opt-outs on security-related EU regulations stretching back to the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties, giving them the right to pick and choose which elements of the agreement, if any, they want to introduce. At least some of the measures will face the same opposition from Eastern European countries as did the 2015 compulsory quotas proposal that was abandoned. In a rare instance of agreement, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a Europhile, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Euroskeptic, were both quick to openly reject the new solidarity mechanism providing for the relocation of migrants from one EU country to another.
Less than two weeks after its ratification by the European Parliament, the prospects for an orderly and efficient rollout of the Pact on Migration and Asylum across the bloc are already looking grim. As with the U.K.’s much-maligned Rwanda scheme—whereby asylum-seekers would be deported to Rwanda for processing and, in the event their application is approved, resettlement—the plan to process some asylum-seekers in non-EU countries will likely face a series of legal challenges from migrant rights groups. Meanwhile, far-left and Green parties in several member states have vowed to fight on against what they see as the pact’s most regressive measures, even as the far right can be expected to use its increased presence in the European Parliament after the June elections to attempt to wreck the whole scheme from within.
European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen as well as EU leaders facing threats from far-right, anti-immigrant parties at home had hoped that the passage of the pact through the European Parliament would cool the heated EU debate on migration once and for all. Given the hard political realities still surrounding the deal, however, those hopes are likely to be dashed.
John Boyce is an Irish freelance journalist with a background in international relations. He writes for a variety of publications on Spanish and Latin American politics and culture.