Refugee Rights Europe
RRE
Refugee Rights Europe is a human rights advocacy organisation and registered charity.
ID: 633566136431-10
Lobbying Activity
Response to New Pact on Migration and Asylum
10 Aug 2020
Refugee Rights Europe believes that the New Pact on Migration and Asylum is an opportunity for shifting the approach to migration and asylum within the EU from a merely security-driven and crisis-mode approach to a rights-based approach which upholds EU values of human dignity, the rule of law and human rights. Despite its profound conviction that the EU Migration and Asylum policies can be more rights-focused, Refugee Rights Europe also sees the risk that the New Pact might conversely come to further normalise and deepen current trends witnessed across Europe. These include the increased use of pushbacks at internal and external land and maritime borders of the EU, further externalisation of migration and asylum policies, restricted access to asylum on EU territory, and the accompanying aggravation of the already dire humanitarian situation at Europe borders.
The European response to asylum and migration must therefore be directed towards sustainable solutions upholding without exception individuals’ access to asylum as per Article 80 of the TFEU and in full compliance with international and European human rights and refugee law. Such a response implies that displaced people can access Europe in a safe and dignified way. Expanding legal channels to and across the EU is therefore necessary, both for people who fit the traditional ‘refugee’ definition as contained within the 1951 Geneva Convention, as well as those having been displaced from their home countries due to other forms of protracted crises, including climate change, entrenched extreme poverty and generalised violence. People always have and always will travel to Europe by their own means and without necessarily being in possession of the required paperwork: these people are rights holders under international and European human rights and refugee law. European border management must guarantee those rights under all circumstances: when enforced by Member States or the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, to ensure that individuals are treated in a humane and rights compliant manner. Ultimately, asylum and migration policies should be managed in a humane, responsible and consistent manner as other policy areas within the European Union acquis, and in a less politicised and haphazard way. This includes the elaboration and implementation of a sustainable and systematic responsibility sharing mechanism involving all Member States.
Refugee Rights Europe hopes for this New Pact to:
1. Expand safe and legal pathways to and across the EU to protect individuals from violent criminal trafficking rings and from life-threatening journeys across land and sea.
2. Strengthen the full and harmonised implementation of the Common European Asylum System as it already exists.
3. Pave the way for a revision of the Dublin III Regulation in order to establish a reliable and systematic solidarity mechanism that guarantees asylum seekers’ rights and provides Member States with a framework for fair sharing of responsibilities within an enhanced and consistent EU protection system.
4. Guarantee a rights-based management of European internal and external borders.
5. Increase Members States’ and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency’s accountability for their border practices.
6. Refrain from further externalising European asylum and migration responsibilities to third countries.
7. Offer an alternative narrative about migration and asylum grounded in facts and contributing to empathy, solidarity and social cohesion.
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