EU ‘Migration Pact’ alarms Church and human rights groups

The European Parliament’s rapporteur on migration policy, Tomas Tobe, was clearly quite pleased while unveiling the EU’s new Asylum and Migration Management Regulation to reporters just before Christmas. 

“I feel proud today, proud for Europe,” the Swedish MEP beamed at a Dec 20th press conference in Brussels.

Tobe, a member of center-right Moderate Party, predicted that the “Migration Pact”, as the agreement is commonly called, would “rebuild trust not only between member states but also trust from citizens who want us to handle migration better”.

Screening procedures and agreed quotas

The deal is the final outcome of three years of discussion among EU countries and institutions. It was announced following six days of meetings between representatives of the EU’s parliament and council. 

Full details of the legal text are yet to be published, but it is understood that the provisions mirror in substance the proposals that a qualified majority of EU leaders approved in June 2023 at a meeting of the EU Council (comprising heads of government).

According to the latter, EU states would pursue an express screening procedure at their borders potentially allowing them to deport “unlikely” applicants to willing third countries, without the benefit of a full asylum procedure. They would also be able to keep applicants, including family groups, in detention facilities during initial screening. 

To ease strains on Mediterranean countries in particular all EU members would either have to accept an agreed quota of successful applicants or pay extra money to support frontline states to manage migration on behalf of the bloc. 

“Capture and return”, “push-backs”, and corrosion of the UN Refugee Convention

The pact emerges against a background that is making civil society groups wary. For years  the EU has drawn fire from human rights defenders for a deteriorating asylum regime seemingly corrosive of the  1951 UN Refugee Convention.

A migration partnership with Libya in 2017 has seen the EU support “capture and return” operations by Libya’s Coast Guard. Would-be asylum seekers bound for Europe are frequently interned in EU-funded detention facilities where rape and torture are commonplace. 

The EU’s member states, and common border agency Frontex, have also been implicated in hundreds of illegal “push-backs” in the Mediterranean. Boats carrying potential asylum applicants are forcibly removed from territorial waters before reaching land, often by using violent ramming maneuvers against fragile crafts. Despite fatal consequences, EU authorities have shown a strange reluctance to investigate allegations of malpractice.

Six-hundred migrants drowned in one night in June 2023 when the visibly overloaded Trawler Adrianna capsized in international waters in full view of Greek Coast Guard vessel 920. The latter, investigative journalists suggest, was likely observing an unofficial policy of “non-intervention” by Greek authorities that is aimed at deterring people-smuggling operations.  

Caritas Europa and Jesuit Refugee Service sound the alarm

Criticism of the pact has come swiftly. A coalition of over 50 humanitarian NGOs – including Caritas Europa and Jesuit Refugee Service – published a letter on Dec. 18th warning that the pact would allow countries to arbitrarily detain children, legalize irregular “push-backs” across borders and increase “racial profiling”. 

Worse, the letter said, the deal would facilitate EU states returning individuals to, so-called, “safe third countries” where they face the “risk of violence, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment”. The pact could also perpetuate “failed approaches of the past and worsen their consequences”, the signatories warned. 

“Today is a catastrophic day for people fleeing war and violence… a compromise at the expense of human rights”. Christos Christou, head of aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) told Politico Europe.

A deal to counter the far right?

Critics allege a link between the deal and European Parliament elections, which will be held in May. Currently, opinion polls suggest  alt-right and far-right parties are destined to make significant gains at the expense of centrist groups. Their scope to do so is boosted by public anxiety in some EU states about the strength of present migration flows. 

Days before agreement on the pact was reached Frontex announced that in the first 11 months of 2023 incidents of irregular entry to the bloc (often involving multiple individuals) reached 355,300. That’s the highest level since the so-called “Migration Crisis” of 2015-2016, which saw 1.2 million people arrive from the Middle East and North Africa. 

Asylum applications in the EU from individuals arriving by all routes (including legal ones) neared 1 million in 2022. That was also the highest since 2016. Principle countries of origin were, in descending order, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Venezuela, and Colombia. 

Those numbers exclude the estimated 4 million Ukrainians who have been granted humanitarian protection under a special EU scheme that was launched following Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country in Feb 2022. Their arrival in the EU has generally been met with public sympathy, in contrast to the hostility shown to dark-skinned migrants from further afield.

Cynical electoral calculus

Europe’s Christian Democrat parties (mainly Catholic in origin) and other center-right parties are grouped in the moderate-conservative European People’s Party (EPP). They are understood to be especially nervous about the potential of voters defecting further to the right and so have incentives to project a tougher stance on migration.

Suspicions that the Migration Pact’s measures are driven by a cynical electoral calculus, not sound technical principles, appear more credible given words uttered ahead of negotiations by Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.

“An agreement on this package before the end of the year will mean a decisive victory for the constructive pro-European center ahead of the start of a European elections year,” she said in a Dec. 14 address to EU lawmakers.

Europe’s Catholic bishops weigh in

Metsola, an MEP for Malta’s EPP-affiliated Nationalist Party, is one of the legislature’s most prominent Catholic deputies. The Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) awarded her with the “In Veritate” Prize last September for “her achievements in combining Christian and European values”. But her stance on the pact has put her at odds with the organization. 

“Fear of people coming with different cultural or religious backgrounds, who may challenge our ‘European way of life’, as well as the fear of populism and of losing elections, cannot be the guiding principles of our asylum and migration policies,” COMECE said in a Dec. 22 statement. 

Besides highlighting potential human rights issues COMECE also critiqued the pact theologically. Recalling the precarious context of Jesus’s birth and flight into Egypt, it affirmed, “That is why, beyond laws and policies, the Church will always be on the side of the most vulnerable, of those people forced to move in search of a dignified life.” 

The bishops urged politicians to join them in allowing “the Nativity of Christ to illuminate our minds and move our hearts to take the right decisions”.

The tendency of moderate-conservatives to stake electoral success on harsh anti-immigrant measures in order to “keep out the far-right” received a more secular critique from Dutch-Liberal MEP Sophie in 't Veld.

“A Chinese wall between [center and extreme] parties is pointless if there is no Chinese wall between their views [and] their programs,” she said Dec. 29 on EU Scream, a progressive political podcast from Brussels. 

“Many mainstream parties,” she warned, “have completely adopted the discourse of the far-right.”

Alexander Faludy is a freelance Hungarian-British journalist who lives in Budapest.