2024-04-10T20:46:50+00:00
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/ The European Parliament made wide-ranging amendments to asylum policies in the European Union, on Wednesday, in a move to reach a difficult settlement on an issue that has fueled tensions and divisions between the 27 member states of the continental bloc for years.
Parliament voted in favor of 10 texts that constitute the “Migration and Asylum Charter,” during a plenary session in Brussels that was briefly interrupted by protests by activists hostile to this reform, according to Reuters.
The new charter received majority support, with 322 members voting in favor and 266 against, while 31 members abstained from voting, according to the European Parliament website.
German Chancellor Olaf Schulz described the agreement as an “indispensable, historic step,” while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed his country’s rejection of the new mechanism for resettling migrants on the continent.
Under the new “Migration and Asylum Agreement” in the European Union, irregular migrants who enter the bloc’s countries will be subject to identity, health and security checks, and their facial and biometric fingerprint data will be recorded, in a process that may take up to 7 days.
Children will receive special treatment, and Member States will impose independent oversight mechanisms to ensure that their rights are preserved.
The procedure aims to determine which migrants can receive urgent or regular expedited measures to process their applications, and which migrants can be returned to their countries of origin, or those through which they passed.
Under the new law, asylum requests from countries whose citizens are rejected in at least 80% of cases and whose chances of obtaining protected status are less likely will be processed more quickly.
Citizens of countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Bangladesh fall into this category.
Simplified applications will also be processed in centers not far from the “external borders” of the European Union, that is, land borders, ports, and to some extent airports as well, so that they can be returned quickly if a decision is issued that their request is baseless 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 annually.
Unaccompanied minors who are believed to pose a security risk and families who come with children will also be detained in the centres.
The new system will reform the “Dublin III” mechanism applied in the European Union, which stipulates that the first country an irregular migrant enters is generally responsible for examining his 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.
Payment for hosting
At least 30,000 asylum seekers will come annually under this relocation system, and a financial compensation of 600 million euros ($650 million) will be determined for countries that prefer to pay instead of hosting.
The package specifies an emergency response in the event of the arrival of an unexpectedly large number of migrants, the same type of crisis that the European Union faced in 2015 and 2016, when more than two million asylum seekers entered the bloc, many of whom came 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.
EU 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.
A safe third country
The “safe third country” principle will be allowed to be applied when examining asylum seekers.
This could mean that an irregular migrant who has arrived in the EU via a country deemed sufficiently “safe” could be 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.