Eurasia Press & News
Behind the EU’s ‘historic’ migration pact lurks a policy to further outsource asylum procedures and loosen the definition of ‘safe’ third countries, experts warn. Refugees, and the Western Balkans, both stand to lose out.
When interior ministers of the 27 European Union member countries met on Thursday, June 8, to discuss reforming the bloc’s asylum system, few expected a deal to emerge.
The issue had been discussed for years without result. Yet at the 11th hour, a new Migration Pact Agreement was indeed announced, supported by an unexpectedly large majority.
Germany’s Nancy Faeser hailed the deal as “historic”. She was right, said Alberto-Horst Neidhardt, head of the migration programme at the European Policy Centre think-tank, in the sense that “the actual start of the negotiation of reforms to the immigration and asylum policy area started over seven years ago.”
“From that viewpoint, it is historic,” he told BIRN. But that doesn’t make it great. As Neidhardt and other experts pointed out, the deal doesn’t really address the shortcomings of the current European asylum system, mainly with regards to the disproportionate impact of migration on the member countries at the EU’s external border.
Worse still, it signals a legislative step back in terms of the rights of refugees and migrants in the EU, and could be bad news for the EU’s neighbours, including those in the Balkans.
