The new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

By Anabela Mateus and Ana Cunha from Lusófona University

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum establishes a set of rules that will contribute to the orderly management of arrivals to the EU, the creation of efficient and uniform procedures, and ensure a fairer, more efficient and more sustainable system for distributing asylum applications between Member States.

The entire process that led to the approval of the pact began in 2016, when almost two million irregular migrants and asylum seekers reached the EU fleeing the war in Syria. The European Commission presented several proposals for the reform of the Common European Asylum System, with a global agreement between the Council and the European Parliament having been reached on 20 December 2023. All the details of the texts were fine tuned in January/beginning of February 2024 and on 10 April 2024 the European Parliament voted in favour of the new rules that constitute the pact, with the European Council adopted it on 14 May 2024.

The pact, intended to manage migration in a way that strengthens solidarity and eases the burden on the Member States to which most migrants arrive, is based on four pillars: (i) secure external borders, (ii) fast and efficient procedures, (iii) effective system of solidarity and responsibility, and (iv) embedding migration in international partnerships. One of the terms of this agreement provides that the first EU country where a migrant or refugee enters will then be responsible for the entire process of that person with some migrants or refugees being resettled in other EU countries and the countries that refuse to receive them will have to make a financial contribution.

Although the Member States have reached the political agreement that enabled a vast reform of the migration and asylum policy in the European Union, the truth is that the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is not welcomed by many stakeholders, namely NGOs across Europe that even before its final approval had already expressed some fears about the new legislation. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, ActionAid International, European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights, Caritas Europa, Oxfam, among others accuse the new legislation of: “normalising the arbitrary use of detention of migrants, including children and families, increasing racial profiling, using ‘crisis’ procedures to enable backlashes, and returning individuals to so-called ‘safe third countries’ where they are at risk of violence, torture and arbitrary detention”.

Even if we consider this new pact a big step towards a better management of the migratory crisis that is hitting Europe, the critical voices say that it is far from solving it and the problems that the crisis has raised within the Union remain unresolved and have contributed to the rise of racism and xenophobia, the growing popularity of far-right parties in some countries with clearly anti-immigration views, and to an overall feeling of social and political unrest.