This Pact kills
”Today is indeed a historic day” said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen after the Migration and Asylum Pact passed a much-anticipated vote in the European Parliament last week. She is not wrong, as the EU not only completely changed its migration management, but also lost any remnants of its values in the process. The new Migration and Asylum Pact consists of different interrelated pieces of legislation, all with their own controversial inclusions.
Starting with new screening procedures, asylum seekers will undergo an accelerated process that collects information in the Eurodac database and offers no legal aid. Crucially, information of asylum seekers as young as six years old can now be stored in the database.
Once an asylum seeker arrives and undergoes processing, the “mandatory solidarity” system is meant to ensure that member states share the management of asylum applications to ease the pressure on member states with high arrival rates. However, member states can simply refuse to host an asylum seeker, either by paying €20,000 or by financing even stricter border security both in and outside of the EU.
Having changed the screening and allocation, the new pact also introduces the Crisis Regulation, which is described as an ‘emergency solution’: if there is a “mass influx” of irregular arrivals, member states can apply even stricter measures, e.g. more detentions.
The Migration and Asylum Pact strips people of their fundamental rights and is a complete departure from any values of equality that the European Union supposedly endorses. The Pact outlines how arrivals are treated without consideration of fundamental rights, and establishes vague criteria under which member states can fully remove the bits of protection left to migrants.
Various member states already actively ignore boats in distress at sea as headlines of sinking ships in the Mediterranean have become a recurring reality. The added financial punishment of refusing asylum seekers simply adds another incentive for a more hostile approach. Beyond that, the EU’s recent immigration agreements with authoritarian governments such as Egyptian President Abdel El-Sisi further show how the main motivation behind this pact is not the safeguarding of human lives but political gain.
The vote itself shows that. The centre groups of EPP, S&D and Renew gathered a thin majority to bring the legislation over the line, while facing political opposition from the Greens, the Left Group, countless NGOs and human rights groups, and protestors whose chants during an interruption summed the situation up well: “This Pact kills”.