The European Parliament approved a central package in the new Migration and Asylum Pact on Thursday, April 20th, enshrining the possibility of mandatory relocations and keeping the much-criticized Dublin Regulation in place. While the center-right EPP celebrates the breakthrough agreement, other conservative forces are disappointed but vow to keep on fighting the left-moderate coalition behind the initiative.
“This proposed act is not equipped to deal with today’s migratory pressure, let alone a higher number of future arrivals,” Charlie Weimers, a Swedish parliamentarian from the European Conservative and Reformist (ECR) group said at the parliamentary debate in the plenary. As he summarized in his speech,
By working with the Left, [the EPP’s] report removes instruments necessary to combat illegal migration, retains forced solidarity, [and] reinforces pull factors … This pact [forces] member states to accept migrants against their will. Either we embrace mass migration or reject this deal. That is the choice.
Considered to take a generally stricter position on migration than we are used to seeing from the Parliament in recent years, but still softer than what the leaders in the EU Council would hope for, the package—that was voted for by the EPP as well as the leftist S&D, Renew, and Greens—is the same one which passed first in the LIBE committee (on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs) at the end of March.
Even then, the compromise was hailed by the leftist and center-right MEPs as a “historic step forward,” but the conservative ECR and ID groups, who were repeatedly sidelined throughout the process, believed the deal made the original “proposal for an EU asylum and migration pact even worse.”
Our detailed reporting on the initial LIBE vote is available here.
In principle, the new rules seek to make it harder for migrants to enter the Union without genuine reason to apply for international protection, while, if already there, make it harder to travel from one EU country to another and apply for asylum multiple times, which has been one of the main concerns of many member states calling for comprehensive reforms.
However, those who were hoping for a complete overhaul of the Dublin Regulation—the apparent loopholes of which make the secondary movements possible in the first place—were let down again, as the final agreement failed to modify it significantly, prompting conservative MEPs to doubt its effectiveness. As the minority position filed by MEPs from the ECR and ID group after the LIBE vote explained:
The Commission proposed … a screening procedure to introduce a pre-entry process allowing the national authorities at the external border to channel to the appropriate procedure all third-country nationals who have crossed the border in an unauthorized manner.
Unfortunately, the Rapporteur’s draft proposal altered the Commission proposal to such an extent that it is no longer fit for purpose. If adopted it would make it almost impossible for member states to effectively combat illegal migration to the EU.
Another stumbling block in the agreement is that it allows the Commission to retain the ability to command the mandatory redistribution of migrants among the member states—also known as the migrant quota system—which is the EU’s most controversial migration policy to date since it was initiated back in 2015.
Although consistent opposition to the redistribution scheme from a number of national governments eventually forced the Commission to promise to replace it with a voluntary mechanism in the new Migration and Asylum Pact (the EU’s flagship migration project planned to be finalized within a year), now it seems that the “mandatory” aspect found its way back into the agreement, even if with certain compromises.
As a supposed middle-ground, the relevant amendment allows the Commission to opt for mandating compulsory relocation only in the specific case when a member state experiences “an exceptional situation of mass influx of third-country nationals.”
For conservatives, however, this phrasing is not good enough, feared to be too open for interpretation—and therefore, to abuse—as the threshold of this vaguely defined “mass influx” or how we are to measure it simply remained unspecified. As Mr. Weimers told The European Conservative, the redistribution scheme, in any way or form, is too “expensive and undemocratic.”
And although the center-right EPP makes it look like the pact represents a successful rightward shift within the Parliament—which even if it is, it’s only in order to be able to reach a compromise with the Council later on—it’s still a long way from what conservative MEPs are hoping to achieve before the full Migration Pact is finalized sometime before the 2024 European Parliament elections. Toward that goal, the ECR and ID are ready to keep fighting with concrete recommendations in mind.
As Mr. Weimers put it during the parliamentary debate:
Yes, it is true. We do not accept migrant quotas dictated from Brussels, but we stand here with our hands outstretched, ready to cooperate on delivering future-proof solutions.
We need to secure the external borders, utilize the external dimension to prevent and disincentivize illegal migration, [and] relocate the entire asylum system to third-country reception centers.
Europe’s future is at stake.
