28- Jun-2023- News Agencies
EU’s slow move to common asylum policy ‘fails to prevent deaths’
The EU’s migration pact is set to come into force by 2026. Meanwhile, refugees will keep dying in the Mediterranean, experts say.
That peril came into sharp relief on June 14, when more than 500 asylum seekers are believed to have drowned following the sinking of their trawler 47 miles (75km) off Greece’s west coast. The vessel had left Libya and was bound for Italy
A week earlier, EU governments reached an initial agreement on rules for processing asylum applications and for asylum burden-sharing across the bloc.
These are key chapters of a migration pact under discussion for the past eight years, but the agreement involves only how states share responsibility once someone has crossed the external border.
It does not address the issue of how to prevent those crossings from countries like Turkey and Libya bordering the EU.
“There has to be continuous engagement with third countries, and there have to be incentives [for them to take people back],” said an immigration expert with knowledge of the negotiations, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “It’s up to us to go out there and talk.”
Many countries – a large majority of states – want to strengthen this concept … it was agreed that we will return to the discussion in a year,” said a Brussels diplomat involved in the talks.
In theory, a safe third countries policy would be in place by 2026, when the migration pact will enter into force.
Until the EU engages with third countries to negotiate terms of return, say experts, the bloc will have little option but to rescue those who set out across the sea, and those people will have a strong incentive to do so.
“Forty-five percent of asylum applicants [in the EU] receive asylum,” the Brussels diplomat told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
“The rest are supposed to go home, but in practice that doesn’t happen because their country won’t take them, or they refuse to go. Ninety percent of those refused asylum remain, and that is a huge driver for illegal trafficking,” the diplomat added
But what is a front-line state?
A million asylum seekers entered Europe in 2015, more than 800,000 of them through Greece. The voluntary relocation scheme that year took just under 30,000 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy.
But recent events have complicated the discussion about what is a front-line state.
