On December 20, the Council and the Parliament finalized a political agreement on the important but controversial EU Pact on Asylum and Migration.

The agreement implies the end of the phase of the ‘political’ trialogues between the Council, the Parliament, and the Commission. In the coming months, and most importantly before the end of the legislature (which, for the Parliament, means spring 2024), the Council and the Parliament will have to vote to confirm the content of the political agreement and only after that the different legal instruments composing the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration will be published on the Official Journal of the EU and then enter into force.

This legislative package, once entered into force, will replace the existing legal framework on asylum and migration after almost two legislatures of negotiations, as the latest major reform in the field dates back to 2013 (with the reform of the Dublin Regulation). The EU Pact is composed of five proposed legislative instruments: the Screening Regulation, on the identification of non-EU nationals upon their arrival in the territory of an EU Member State; the revised Eurodac Regulation on the common database gathering data of migrants; the Asylum Procedures Regulation, which should establish a a common procedure for international protection in the EU; the Asylum Migration Management Regulation, which purports to establish a new mechanism attempting to balance amongst Member States the responsibility for asylum applications; and finally the Crisis and Force majeure Regulation, that is intended to fight against the controversial concept of instrumentalisation of migration.

In front of what seems a major advancement, there are reasons to be optimistic, but there are perhaps even more reasons to criticise the proposed reform.

The reason to be optimistic is the political agreement in itself. The Spanish presidency of the Council promised, at the beginning of its six-month mandate, to broker a deal and they delivered it. This is a sign of unity of the EU in front of a challenge that is common to all the EU Member States.

However, the political agreement happened at a turning point of the EU political legislature, and all the political groups of the Parliament as well as the governments in the Council had to make compromises to reach this agreement. Despite the UN High Commissioner for Refugees congratulated the EU Member States on the deal, several NGOs underlined that this compromise has been reached at the expenses of the fundamental rights of migrants (the political compromise has been described by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles as a ‘dark day for Europe’), of facilitating the externalization of migration procedures as well as of promoting an inadequate vision on solidarity between the EU Member States at the border and the ones at the center.

In the coming weeks, the Council and the Parliament will discuss the legal details of the agreement and will publish the texts over which they agreed the political compromise. One should refrain judging a book from its cover but, from the information available, this proposed reform seems to take a step forward, and two steps back.

Giovanni Zaccaroni is a team member of the FAMIMOVE Research Unit of the University of Milan-Bicocca. This comment reflects the personal views of the author and not the ones of the Project

Photo credits: European Union, 2017

No Comments
Comments to: The Council and the Parliament reached a ‘political’ agreement on the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Attach images - Only PNG, JPG, JPEG and GIF are supported.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.



Useful Links



blog Archive



Latest Articles

  1. Blog
We are happy to announce that the book “Children in Migration and International Family Law” has been recently published and is available open access on the website of the publisher. The book is one of the main deliverables of the FAMIMOVE Project (together with the Awareness Raising Seminars, the Transnational Roundtables, the European Conference, and […]