STATEMENT OF “CENTER OF LEGAL AID -VOICE IN BULGARIA” ON THE EUROPEAN PACT ON MIGRATION AND ASYLUM ADOPTED ON 10 APRIL 2024 Екип ЦПП April 18, 2024

STATEMENT OF “CENTER OF LEGAL AID -VOICE IN BULGARIA” ON THE EUROPEAN PACT ON MIGRATION AND ASYLUM ADOPTED ON 10 APRIL 2024

The European Parliament adopted the so-called “European Agenda on Migration and Asylum” on 10 April 2024. On 10 April 2024, the European Parliament will adopt the European Pact on Migration and Asylum (“the Pact”). This supranational event, which has a direct and serious impact on our national policies, has been greeted by our national institutions with silence, disorientation and a vacuum: a chronic reaction, particularly on the part of our national administrations, which are directly responsible for migration issues.

This chronicity, however, is a cause for concern, especially since in 2023 Bulgaria will implement a six-month pilot project with the European Commission. The pilot project is a precursor to the Migration Pact in action. Moreover, we should not be surprised by the events this time, as the Pact being voted on is in fact the product of a series of decisions taken at European level over the past eight years.

The Pact is a package of documents, mainly in the form of regulations, which means that they are directly binding on EU countries.

Given its content and structure, the Pact raises a fundamental question, namely is this a “historic” reformist agreement or a deal allowing serious compromises with the fundamental rights of migrants.

It is extremely worrying that there is a lack of understanding and debate in Bulgaria about the impact of the Pact on fundamental human rights. At the same time, the Covenant contains more than one worrying trend in this direction:

  • The risk of derogation from the fundamental principles of access to territory and to the international protection procedure;
  • The risk of deviating from the basic principle of individual consideration of the refugee’s story;
  • Creating the conditions for increased de facto detention of migrants, including children;
  • Speeding up procedures for the return of third-country nationals, while delaying and restricting effective legal aid mechanisms and the right to effective judicial review;
  • Increasing the role of so-called safe third countries, despite the far from problem-free experience with Turkey, Libya, Niger, etc.

The Pact highlights a serious asymmetry between the focus and resources devoted to securing Europe’s borders, on the one hand, and the lack of a concrete vision and commitment on the part of Member States to create alternative legal ways of accessing the territory, to regularise residence in cases of irregular status, to provide alternatives to immigration detention, on the other. However, it is precisely the lack of legal alternatives that encourages the practice of smuggling, which poses a serious risk to the lives of migrants themselves and to the national security of Member States. The piecemeal approach of successively funding surveillance systems and strengthening border security cannot provide a sustainable and long-term solution to the problem of smuggling and does not contribute to the effective management of migration processes. The one-sidedness of the methods leads to temporary solutions, where if the statistics of the so-called ‘migratory pressure’ are low today, they will be high tomorrow. At this stage, the Pact does not seem to offer comprehensive solutions that seek symmetry between security and fundamental human rights.

On the question of endangering the fundamental rights of migrants, what is striking about the process of drafting the Pact is the absence of a specific and clear reference to violent pushbacks at Europe’s borders. Forced returns are an extremely serious form of violation of fundamental human rights, involving systematic violence and degrading practices against people crossing borders. In the context of these routinely violent practices, the so-called independent human rights monitoring mentioned in the Covenant appears to be a rather inadequate instrument, vaguely and extremely broadly formulated, with many question marks as to its effective application.

Overall, the Pact places a strong emphasis on the management of migration processes at external borders. Bulgaria is an external border of the EU, with one of the longest and most complex land borders, namely our border with Turkey. This fact should make the lack of a lively, multilateral debate on the impact of the pact adopted a few days ago on our national policies all the more worrying. The lack of debate, the lack of critical analysis, the lack of an active attitude and the lack of involvement of the responsible institutions unfortunately opens a wider field for populist rhetoric.

In the coming months, we will continue to seek active interaction with the relevant institutions at European and national level to raise awareness of the practical implementation of the new rules and the forthcoming process of drawing up a national plan for their implementation.