MEPs to vote on divisive migration policy in ‘big moment for Europe’

The European parliament is to vote on Wednesday on sweeping new laws to overhaul its migration policy amid renewed criticism that it is feeding the agenda of the extreme right rather than protecting vulnerable people.

Ylva Johansson, the home affairs commissioner who was the driving force behind the legislation, said on Tuesday that with the reforms aimed at “managing migration in an orderly way”, the 27-member bloc was taking a step towards neutralising the populist far right.

“We have already taken away a lot of the arguments from the far right by reaching this agreement,” she told reporters, adding: “I hope we will get the vote because it has been a long journey, a marathon.”

“It will really be a big, big moment for Europe, showing that we can deal with very challenging political issues in an environment that is challenging,” she said.

But the package of laws remain contentious even among supportive politicians, with critics saying that far from neutralising the far-right the new laws in effect normalise its arguments and do nothing to stop the ever-growing death toll on migration routes to the EU.

Malin Björk, an MEP for the Swedish Left party, said: “This is an adaptation of what the far right have been asking for for years. Can we come up with something even more dehumanising? This is taking some of the worst of practices in the EU and institutionalising it.”

On the eve of the vote representatives of 161 civil society organisations called on MEPs to reject the legislation, saying it had been “flawed from the beginning”.

Stephanie Pope, Oxfam’s expert on EU migration, said the package had little to do with the human rights of desperate people and more to do with “deterrents, detention and deportation”. The legislation, which comes to the vote two months before the European elections in June, was “very political and zero evidence based”, she added.

The wide-ranging package of laws, first proposed in 2018, is designed to speed up asylum processes, with decisions on eligibility and forced returns in as little as 12 weeks.

The laws will also introduce a unified central screening system at all points on the EU’s external border, as well as a “solidarity” mechanism demanded by Greece and Italy to allow countries overwhelmed by volume of arrivals to have asylum processes relocated to another member state.

If passed, the legislation will also establish Eurodac, a central database that will allow member states to see if someone has applied for asylum in another country.

Björk, who was rapporteur for the committee responsible for shepherding through the package’s laws on resettlement, said the legislation “does not solve any of the problems it was supposed to”, including the number of people dying while trying to make perilous crossings. More than 29,000 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, and although it remains the deadliest migration route in the world others are also claiming large numbers of lives.

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In January and February this year more than 12,000 people crossed the Atlantic to try to reach the Canary Islands. Reports have also suggested more people-smuggling from Lebanon to Cyprus and Greece.

Three of the eight political groupings in the European parliament – the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the left’s Socialists and Democrats and the liberal Renew group – are expected to give majority backing to the laws on Wednesday but there was speculation on Tuesday that support was not guaranteed from each MEP within those groups.

The Swedish EPP MEP, Tomas Tobé, rapporteur for the asylum management laws, said he would be working “hour by hour” to ensure the package crossed the finishing line.

The Greens and European Free Alliance, which has 72 members out of a total 705 MEPs, is expected to vote for two of the 10 files – or packages – of laws on the table, supporting only those on resettlement and standards in reception centres.

Sources in the group said that overall, the pacts represented “a significant backsliding for the rights of refugees” and are “full of legal inconsistencies that will inevitably lead to fundamental rights violations”.

They feel that rather that “disproportionately work on deterrence”, the EU should be working with international partners to build safe systems for everyone. Insiders say they think the only two bills that do this are the proposed laws to standardise conditions in reception centres and settlement programmes.

Sophie In’t Veld, a liberal MEP and another rapporteur on the legislation, said she would be abstaining, rather than voting no, on one of the 10 files. She told reporters she was “not an activist, but a politician” and “sometimes that is painful but it is the only way to get things through”.

One of the big issues that has overshadowed the debate on migration is how member states have failed to use their existing powers to return those who have failed asylum applications, with people able to remain and move around Europe for years before a decision is made.

Johansson said the new laws would “close the loopholes” and the sometimes years-long gap between asylum decisions and court orders that tell those with a negative decision to leave the EU.

“I think during the next mandate [parliamentary term] we will see the return rate double,” she said.