NOVANEWS
Council Summit Should Endorse Approach Based on Human Rights Obligations
The EU talks a lot these days about promoting its values in the Middle East and North Africa. But when it comes to migrants and asylum seekers, those values are all too often thrown out the window.
Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher
The EU talks a lot these days about promoting its values in the Middle East and North Africa. But when it comes to migrants and asylum seekers, those values are all too often thrown out the window.
Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher
(Brussels) – European Union (EU) heads of state meeting in Brussels later this week should put human rights at the heart of EU migration and asylum policy, Human Rights Watch said today. Migration is high on the agenda for the European Council summit on June 23 and 24, 2011, with external border control, free movement inside the EU, the Common European Asylum system, and migration cooperation with North Africa expected to be discussed.
The European Council meeting comes at a critical moment, Human Rights Watch said. Upheaval in North Africa has brought thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to European shores, and led to growing numbers of migrant deaths at sea. Efforts to reform common asylum rules and enhance solidarity within the EU remain largely stalled, while an emphasis on border enforcement has come at the expense of protecting migrants’ rights and access to asylum.
“The EU talks a lot these days about promoting its values in the Middle East and North Africa,” said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But when it comes to migrants and asylum seekers, those values are all too often thrown out the window.”
The EU currently falls short in five key areas that undermine its obligations to protect asylum seekers and migrants, Human Rights Watch said:
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The failure to reform the Dublin regulation, which requires asylum claims to be heard in the first EU state a migrant reaches. This places a disproportionate burden on states at the EU’s external borders, including Greece, which has a broken asylum system.
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The continued asylum crisis and the inhuman and degrading detention conditions for migrants in Greece, with EU assistance focused more on securing its border with Turkey than ensuring humane treatment for migrants.
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Insufficient efforts to prevent the deaths at sea of boat migrants fleeing Libya and other parts of North Africa. As many as 1,500 migrants have died trying to cross to Europe during the first six months of 2011.
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Limited resettlement by EU countries of refugees from North Africa, while Egypt and Tunisia continue to host hundreds of thousands.
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The use of readmission agreements, which facilitate the return of migrants and asylum seekers entering the EU to transit countries – such as Ukraine – that lack the will or capacity to guarantee them access to asylum and to treat them humanely.