The Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament has mounted more pressure on reluctant member states to show concrete solidarity with countries overburdened with migration.
Now the ball is in the (European) Commission’s court
Approving a non-binding resolution, which still needs to obtain plenary green light, MEPs suggested setting up an “EU distribution key” – similar to the one used for EU budgets – to specify how many asylum seekers each member state should offer to relocate.
This distribution key for the relocation of persons with international protection should use objective indicators, such as member states’ GDP, population, surface area and beneficiaries’ best interests, including family, to determine relocation quotas.
“We have sent a strong signal to the European Commission and to member states on how we conceive solidarity in the field of asylum through concrete proposals to translate this principle into action,” Kyriacos Triantaphyllides, a Cypriot MEP acting as the committee’s rapporteur, said following the vote. “Now the ball is in the Commission’s court,” he added.
Despite various efforts made by the Commission and pressure by member states like Malta, Italy and Greece over the past years, real solidarity has not been forthcoming from other, particularly northern, member states.
A 2009 intra-EU relocation pilot project, specifically designed to relocate asylum seekers and protected persons from Malta, attracted few pledges.
Ironically, Malta found more solidarity from the US and Canada, which have well-established international protection programmes, than its EU partners.
Reiterating the need for a permanent intra-EU relocation programme, something the Commission is still studying and with no specific legislative proposal in sight, MEPs also asked for more specific measures of solidarity.
These include the joint processing of asylum applications for member states to support one another at various stages of the procedure, an increase in financial allocations to overburdened member states and closer cooperation with the Malta-based European Asylum Support Office to help reduce the significant divergences in asylum practices.
The EU is discussing a reform of its asylum policy and is expected to conclude negotiations by the end of the year. Proposals made by the Commission to help Malta and other member states, such as a revision of the Dublin II regulations (on which member state is responsible for processing asylum applications) and “voluntary” relocation schemes, have had to be discarded following objections by many member states.