EU migration reform emphasizes rapid deportations and limited appeal rights for asylum seekers

The European Parliament adopted its Pact on Migration and Asylum on April 10, 2024, removing a major hurdle on the way to European Union law. The set of regulations and directives aims to update EU policy towards migrants and refugees.

The pact is a legacy of the 2015 migration crisis, when EU countries saw more than 1 million people apply for asylum after arriving in European countries, mainly by boat. The majority were fleeing violence and war in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Frontline European countries, including Greece and Italy, were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, sparking anti-migrant violence and a response from far-right political parties.

During the crisis, some European states, including Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia, closed their borders, effectively trapping 60,000 people in Greece in tent cities.

I am a political scientist who researches the way states and international organizations deal with refugee issues. In 2016 I visited some camps in Greece. Authorities there struggled to provide the bare minimum of assistance and failed to provide legal protection or process asylum applications. Many of these people waited years for an appointment to examine their asylum application. Greece still had a backlog of 22,316 asylum cases in 2022.

As such, the need for migration reforms has become apparent. European leaders hope the newly agreed pact will prevent future migration crises in Europe by tightening borders, making it easier to deport asylum seekers and spreading the workload across the EU’s 27 member states.

But for critics of the pact, the reforms will internalize inequality, instrumentalize migration crises and ignore actual gaps in migration management.

Stalling reforms

The new EU pact follows years of debate on migration by member states, a theme I explore in my book ‘Delegating Responsibility’.

In response to the 2015 crisis, the following year the European Council adopted a mandatory quota system to redistribute refugees among all member states based on the size of their economies, populations and own asylum cases. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland refused to participate, and in 2020 the Court of Justice of the EU ruled that they had broken EU law.

Nevertheless, the quota system was never scaled up, leaving frontline states to continue processing a large share of Europe’s refugee population.

Since 2016, the European Commission has proposed several reforms, but negotiations stalled due to opposition from far-right governments in Eastern Europe. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, opposed reforms in 2018, saying: “We must send migrants back to their countries. Brussels says we can’t do it. They also said it was impossible to stop migrants on land, but we did it anyway.”

In terms of content, the new pact consists of six major reforms – all aimed at securing borders and making it easier to deport people, with, critics say, little protection for migrants and asylum seekers.

The first regulation expands the EU’s biometric database for asylum seekers, EURODAC, to include the fingerprints, facial photographs and biographical information of all persons aged six years and over. Previously, the database only contained fingerprints – not images or biographical data – of people over the age of 14. The pact also makes it easier for police to access the database.

Secondly, the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation, or AMMR, continues the Dublin Regulation which requires asylum applications to be assessed by the first Member State they enter.

This means that Greece and Italy will continue to process most asylum applications. However, the AMMR does allow transfers to a third country based on the applicant’s family ties, previous residence or education in another Member State.

These first two regulations will have immediate legal effects if they are adopted by the 27 EU Member States in the European Council before June 2024.

The remaining four directives must be incorporated into the national laws of the EU Member States within the next two years. Together, these other four directives make it more difficult for people to apply for asylum in the EU.

For example, the pact internalizes the policy that ‘hotspot’ reception centers on islands off the coast of Greece and Italy are transit zones and therefore not EU territory. This effectively removes many islands in the Mediterranean from EU territory to deny asylum seekers their full rights.

Another directive overhauls asylum procedures to speed up deportations of people who have passed through a “safe third country” or if they come from a country with recognition rates – the share of asylum applications approved from a given country of origin – below 20 %.

Human rights groups criticize the pact because rapid deportations are based on group characteristics, rather than individual assessment. They argue the reforms also undermine the right of appeal – sometimes deporting people before an appeal decision is finalized – and expand detention.

Exploit migration flows

The EU is not alone in trying to make it more difficult to apply for asylum. Similar to the EU’s ‘safe third country’ policy, the Biden administration implemented the ‘lawful routes’ rule in May 2023 – which was blocked and later reintroduced. Biden’s executive order paralleled President Donald Trump’s previous transit and entry bans, arguing that asylum seekers should apply in the first safe country they travel through. Courts blocked Trump and initially blocked Biden because US law guarantees everyone the right to seek asylum, regardless of their previous immigration status or how they entered the US. The rule is currently suspended pending a settlement.

The EU reforms also parallel Biden’s recent proposals to close the border during migration waves. The pact creates a new procedure to suspend normal asylum rules if a country on the EU’s external border ‘instrumentalises migration’ – in other words, if a country deliberately sends migrants or refugees with the aim of destabilizing the EU.

The provision addresses fears that Belarus, which is not a member of the EU, was “weaponizing migration” in 2021 by encouraging Syrians and Iraqis to cross the border into Poland, an EU state.

There is a growing academic literature on ‘migration diplomacy’ and ‘refugee blackmail’, documenting how states use migration flows as a tool in their foreign policy.

However, the EU pact’s approach suspends the rights of asylum seekers rather than addressing the larger geopolitical threats.

The most controversial directive revives quotas, but with a ‘flexible solidarity mechanism’. This mechanism would come into effect if large numbers of asylum seekers enter an EU state, causing their reception system to become overloaded. Under these circumstances, other EU countries could choose to accept asylum seekers from frontline states or finance deportations. States would have to move at least 30,000 people a year, but could choose to pay 20,000 euros (US$21,000) for each person.

Critics argue that this commodifies refugees – literally putting a price tag on individual lives – while undermining solidarity.

‘Fortress Europe’

The need for migration reforms in the EU was highlighted by the 2015 crisis faced by European countries on the front line.

But rather than addressing the real problems of low state capacity, turnaround times, human rights protection or conditions in detention centers, I believe the pact will reinforce the concept of ‘Fortress Europe’ by investing in deterrence and deportation , and not in human rights.