“The draft “immigration law” sacrifices the fundamental rights of foreigners”

2023-12-09 07:00:21

Monday, December 11, a text of major seriousness for the fundamental rights of foreigners must be discussed in the National Assembly. As soon as it was presented by the government, I warned of the numerous attacks on rights and freedoms included in the bill “to control immigration, improve integration”. The demagogic escalation during parliamentary debates, particularly in the Senate, has aggravated them in defiance of the constitutional and international obligations of the State.

Firstly, in the name of the legitimate objective of safeguarding public order and combating irregular immigration, the bill removes a number of guarantees currently provided to protect the fundamental rights of foreigners. It also increases, with a particularly broad meaning of public order, the possibilities of refusal or withdrawal of the right to stay, including for people who have not been the subject of any criminal conviction. The removal of foreigners would thus be largely left to the discretion of the administration, at the risk of multiplying arbitrary decisions.

The resulting serious weakening of the right to residence would be all the more worrying as the right to a judge is reduced. In particular, the litigation reform envisaged by the project maintains, in many cases, extremely short appeal deadlines, in fact complicating access to the judge.

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Secondly, the text supports the idea, however refuted by numerous studies, according to which “too favorable” reception conditions would encourage irregular immigration or the lasting settlement of foreigners in the territory. Omnipresent in the parliamentary debate, this speech pushed the legislator to consider restrictions on numerous rights, particularly for particularly vulnerable people.

Areas of lesser rights

I am thinking first of the right to asylum, with the multiplication of possibilities for rejecting applications without examination on the merits, coupled with an extension of the single-judge procedure before the National Court of Asylum. I then think of the right to stay for sick foreigners, reserved for cases where the required treatment does not exist at all in the country of origin without otherwise verifying the possibilities of effective access to treatment. This provision would lead to a clear reduction in admissions to stay for care, to the detriment of the health of the people concerned, even though this reason for admission to stay represents a tiny part of the residence permits issued (around 1.5%).

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