2024-04-10T15:24:49+00:00
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/ The European Parliament votes, on Wednesday, on a historic amendment to European Union laws related to asylum seekers and irregular migrants.
The following is an overview of the changes that will come into effect starting in 2026 if the text is adopted:
Checking procedures at the borders
Under the EU’s new Migration and Asylum Compact, irregular migrants entering the EU will be subject to identity, health and security checks. Their facial and biometric fingerprint data will also be recorded, in a process that may take up to seven days.
Children will receive special treatment and Member States will impose independent oversight mechanisms to ensure the preservation of their rights.
The procedure aims to determine which migrants can receive urgent or regular accelerated measures to process their applications and which migrants can be returned to their countries of origin or those through which they passed.
Simplify sorting processes
It will more quickly process asylum claims from countries whose citizens are rejected at least 80 percent of the time, and whose chances of obtaining protected status are lower.
Citizens of countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Bangladesh fall into this category.
The simplified applications will be processed in centers not far from the “external borders” of the European Union, i.e. land borders, ports and to some extent also airports, so that they can be quickly returned in the event that their application is decided to be unfounded and inadmissible.
This will require the use of detention centres, although other measures such as isolating them in homes could be used.
Any center can receive up to 30,000 people in any given period, as the European Union expects up to 120,000 migrants to pass through it annually.
Unaccompanied minors who are believed to pose a security risk and families who come with children will also be detained in the centers.
Solidarity mechanism
The new system will reform the EU’s “Dublin III” mechanism, which stipulates that the first country an irregular migrant enters is ultimately responsible for examining his or her case.
This is currently putting pressure on Italy, Greece and Malta, which have received the bulk of arrivals by land and sea in recent years.
Under the new rules, the “Dublin III” principle, which leaves responsibility to the first country where migrants arrive, will be maintained, but with additional criteria that could transfer the asylum seeker’s file to another EU country.
A compulsory solidarity mechanism requires member states to receive a certain number of asylum seekers arriving in European Union countries located on the bloc’s borders.
If it chooses not to receive them, it can instead provide money or other material contributions or personnel.
At least 30,000 asylum seekers will come annually under this relocation system. A financial compensation amounting to 600 million euros ($650 million) will be determined for countries that prefer to pay instead of hosting.
Response
The package sets out an emergency response in the event of an unexpectedly large number of migrants arriving, the same type of crisis the EU faced in 2015 and 2016 when more than two million asylum seekers entered the bloc, many of them from Syria and Afghanistan.
The number of asylum applications reached 1.14 million in 2023, the highest level since 2016.
It will allow member states to reduce protection measures for asylum seekers, allowing them to be kept for a longer period than is normally allowed in detention centers on the EU’s external borders.
European Union countries also want to deal with the use of the influx of migrants by countries outside the bloc as a “tool.” For example, Belarus and Russia have been accused of encouraging migrants to try to enter the European Union to destabilize the bloc.
“Safe third country”
The “safe third country” principle will be allowed to be applied when examining asylum seekers.
This could mean that an illegal immigrant who has arrived in the EU via a country considered sufficiently “safe” can have their application rejected. But for this to be effective, it must be verified that there is a sufficient “link” between the asylum seeker and the transit country.