During the last hours the member states have reached an agreement in relation to the Migration and Asylum Pact, one of the dossiers that were pending and in which the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has put all his energy. Reaching an agreement at 27 was not an easy task, hence the Government’s satisfaction at being able to score a point on an issue as complicated as it is controversial. Reaching an agreement on this issue, without a doubt, was an objective. The question here is what type of agreement has been closed and whether the conditions under which it has been closed are in accordance with Article 2 of the EU Treaty and the general framework of human rights.
The closure of the Migration and Asylum Pact was an issue that had been worked on for years, when the refugee management crisis showed Europeans the ineffectiveness of the asylum framework on which they had been operating for years, the Dublin Regulations. Since 2020, the Commission has been working with little luck on the approval of a text that could offer a comprehensive migration policy, something it has been working on since the Tampere European Council in 1999. The agenda proposed by the Commission Von der Leyen focused almost exclusively on the issues related to immigration controlforgetting that immigration policy is much more than that.
The axes on which this commitment pivots are three: relations with third countries, or in other words, the outsourcing the management of migratory flows; the control of external borders, that is, the armoring and militarization of the borderand the question of inner solidarity. The underlying idea is that the states that are on the front line will have to implement a stricter asylum procedure for those people whose files are unlikely to be accepted. And all this while encouraging rapid repatriations to countries of origin and transit. It is curious that those who support this agreement argue that it is a creative solution that makes border states so happy without forcing other countries to take in asylum seekers. The certain fact is that this agreement will lead to a proliferation of the number of detention centers at the borders, even extending the detention periods and turning them ‘de facto’ into non-law zones.
Solidarity principle
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In reality, what this pact achieves is to reduce the right of asylum to its minimum expression in an EU act that flagrantly violates international agreements signed by each and every one of the member states. But, in addition, the principle of solidarity, which is one of the essential pillars of the community framework, is absolutely broken with this pact, since states can unilaterally decide whether or not to receive migrants or if they pay a fine in exchange. So in countries like Italy Asylum procedures can be accelerated and rapid help from the rest of the European partners can be called upon, while speeding up the repatriations to a failed state like Libya for the sake of a bilateral agreement signed by Rome in which respect for human life is conspicuous by its absence. This agreement prevents people who arrive at the borders from exercising their right to request asylum, something to which EU states are obliged as signatories of the Geneva Conventions and, therefore, international law would be violated, and The right of states to reject migrants at the border would be sacralized if they were suspected of being “instrumentalized.” by a third actor, as was the case of the crisis on the Belarus border in which flagrant violations of the fundamental rights of these people were identified.
Thus, this pact, in the current terms, represents, without any doubt, a setback in the construction of a Europe of rights and where the immigration issue has succumbed to the agenda of the most reactionary. The achievement of this pact is somewhat in favor of the Spanish presidency, but the price to pay seems too high.