The European Commission plans to make it easier to send asylum seekers for processing beyond the bloc’s borders by revising the concept of a “safe third country”.
Under current EU immigration rules, member states can transfer asylum seekers to a non-EU country that is considered safe, but only if the migrants have a connection with the nation in question, such as a previous visit or family connection.
A new proposal, announced by the Commission last week as part of a wider overhaul of asylum procedures, said that requirement should be removed.
Critics say this mirrors a plan by the previous UK government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, which was scrapped after being ruled unlawful by the country’s Supreme Court.
However, German MEP Lena Düpont, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who supports the proposal, argued that it sends the right message.
Data from the European Commission showed that, every year, at least 400,000 foreign nationals without the right to stay in the EU are ordered to leave. However, only around 20% of them are effectively returned.
Meanwhile, NGOs and migration experts said the proposal raises serious concerns about guaranteeing fundamental human rights, and could burden poorer nations.
“Far from it being chaotic and arbitrary to send people to countries to which they have no connection, no prospects, no support, we also see that as fundamentally devastating on a human level,” said Olivia Sundberg Diez, Amnesty International’s EU advocate for migration and asylum.
“It ignores a person’s agency, and therefore we don’t consider that it can be reasonable to expect them to remain there. This cannot be a sustainable solution,” she added.
Human rights concerns
The proposal follows another motion from the Commission called “Safe Origin Countries”, which was put forward last month.
It said that asylum requests of migrants coming from EU candidate countries, such as Turkey and Georgia, and seven other countries deemed “safe”, could be fast-tracked as they are “unlikely to be successful”.
Some EU member states, including Italy and Greece, already have a national register of safe countries of origin, but the proposed EU list aims to support a more uniform system, according to the Commission.
“The aim is to improve both the processing of asylum claims when they can be seen as manifestly unfounded for various reasons. And at the same time, make sure that those who do not have a right to stay within the European Union, but are already here, are effectively returned,” said Düpont, the German MEP.
Human rights groups have questioned whether some of the countries on the list should really be considered safe. For example, the list includes Egypt, where, according to Human Rights Watch, the authorities systematically detain and punish critics and activists, and persecute LGBTQ+ people.
The Commission has presented the list as a “dynamic” one that can be expanded or modified over time, and said that nations that no longer fulfil the criteria will be removed.
“This increases the risks of arbitrary, automatic detention in countries far from the EU,” said Sundberg Diez of Amnesty.
“We’ve already seen in the EU’s existing engagement with countries like Tunisia [with which the EU has a memorandum of understanding] that it simply doesn’t have the ability or the interest in monitoring and enforcing human rights protections.”
She stressed that the proposals the Commission has put forward since March all have the same intention, “which is making it harder for people to access safety in Europe and shifting that responsibility to offer protection to countries far from the bloc”.
Düpont disagreed with this take.
“Both proposals share the aim to make asylum and return procedures more efficient, more effective, but of course, also more implementable for the member states, so that we can kind of bring back order and humanity to the common European asylum and migration policies,” she said.
The proposals will be heard by the European Parliament and the European Council. This will be followed by talks to agree on a common text, which will eventually become law.
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