EU told to treat refugees and asylum seekers humanely

The European Union (EU) risks “undermining its core values” unless it treats refugees and asylum seekers more humanely, according to a senior Protestant expert – writes Jonathan Luxmoore.

“Two decades ago, most Europeans would never have believed people would be dying on Europe’s borders simply trying to get in,” said Torsten Moritz, executive secretary of the ecumenical Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe (CCME). “Yet thousands have died doing just that, especially in the Mediterranean, this year alone. This is really undermining our core values and having a de-humanising effect on European society.”

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Source:Ekklesia

EU integration bars the persecuted from finding refuge

By Les Back

Asylum seekers’ experiences are uncomfortably close to a dark recent past that spawned the EU ideal.

The European commission’s enthusiasm for “diversity talk” is connected to an admirable yearning to see Europe as a place of refuge to those facing persecution.

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Can EU law protect asylum seekers

By Rosalind English

As EU legal provisions collide with fiscal austerity measures in member states, the case of Greece could be a warning.

The details of the law underlying the case of Saeedi are complex – but its message is simple. Under EU law, member states have to provide minimum standards for the reception of asylum seekers.

But the obligations themselves relate to another body of law that exists, at least philosophically, outside the boundaries of the economic imperatives of the European Union: social and economic rights.

When these were attached to the Maastricht treaty in 1992 as the social chapter, Britain used its opt-out to avoid them becoming part of British law. On this basis, Mr Justice Cranston in the high court said that these rights were not directly enforceable against the UK – that the charter was an aid to interpretation only.

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The detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants in Europe

1.       The detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants in Council of Europe member states has increased substantially in recent years. Whilst the cause of this increase is in part due to the growing number of arrivals of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in certain parts of Europe, it is also to a large extent due to policy and political decisions resulting from a hardening attitude towards irregular migrants and asylum seekers.

2.       Overcrowding in detention centres is a serious problem. As population pushes up against capacity, states are building more and bigger centres. However if they build more, they fill more, often to justify the expenditure. Yet this does not necessarily translate into better conditions for the persons detained. Furthermore, alternative facilities, which are inappropriate for detaining asylum seekers and irregular migrants belonging to this group, such as police stations, prisons, disused army barracks, hotels, mobile containers, etc. are also being used in order to detain growing numbers of persons.

3.       Whilst it is universally accepted that detention must be used only as a last resort, it is increasingly used as a first response and also as a deterrent. This results in mass and needless detention. The Parliamentary Assembly is concerned by this excessive use of detention and the long list of serious problems which arise as a result and which are regularly highlighted, not only by Council of Europe human rights monitoring bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the Human Rights Commissioner and the Assembly’s Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population, but also by other international and national organisations.

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EU should keep sanctions on Mugabe: rights group

AFP – The European Union should maintain its travel ban and asset
freeze on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s inner circle until he makes
reforms set out in a power-sharing deal, Human Rights Watch said Friday.

Mugabe and his erstwhile rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai formed a
unity government nearly one year ago, aiming to end political unrest
targeting mainly supporters of the premier’s Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC).

The deal included provisions for protecting media freedoms, ensuring rule of
law, and bringing to justice the perpetrators of political violence.

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EU plans flights to deport illegal immigrants

By James Kirkup

The European Union is drawing up plans to charter its own flights to return illegal immigrants to their home countries.

Under the plan, individual member states would be able to claim seats on planes for rejected asylum seekers they wish to remove.

The EU flights would then make multiple stops in different countries to collect deportees before flying on to their country of origin. The plan for a common EU approach to repatriation flights is set to be approved by an EU summit in Brussels on Friday.

A document due to be debated at the summit shows that Frontex, the EU’s external border agency, would fund and operate the shared flights. The agency will be asked to explore the possibility of “regular chartering…. of joint return flights”, the document says.

Britain is not a full member of Frontex, but helps fund the Warsaw-based agency and UK borders agency staff have been seconded to work for it.

The proposal, drawn up by Sweden, also calls for more joint naval operations between EU states aimed at intercepting the movement of would-be immigrants by sea. There will also be greater dialogue with the Libyan authorities to persuade them to do more to prevent Libyans setting sail for Europe. Some estimates suggest that more than 100,000 illegal immigrants enter the EU every year via the Mediterranean.

Most end up in Mediterranean countries, who are arguing for a “burden sharing” system where each EU state would get a quota of illegal immigrants it had to accommodate. Britain is strongly opposing that plan. Some EU countries are already co-operating on deportation flights.

Earlier this month, Britain and France combined to charter a flight that returned 27 Afghans to their home country. Twenty-four had claimed asylum in the UK and three had claimed in France. The flight sparked French political protests, but the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to push ahead with tougher immigration policies.On their return to Afghanistan, the deportees were put up in hotels and offered £1,800 to help them resettle.

France last month dismantled “the jungle” at Calais, an impromptu refugee camp for illegal immigrants hoping to enter the UK from France. The two countries have also agreed to establish a new co-ordination centre monitoring illegal immigration, based in Folkstone, Kent.

EU leaders say that a more co-ordinated approach to border control is starting to pay off. Frontex this week said that illegal border crossings into the EU declined by 20 per cent in the first half of the year. However, asylum requests also increased 11 per cent.

Britain to take greater number of asylum seekers under EU plans

By Martin Banks

Commission officials on Wednesday announced the “final building blocks” had been put in place to “harmonise” immigration across the union’s 27 member states.

But critics condemned the proposal, saying it would strip Britain of its sovereign powers to determine asylum policy.

Tim Kirkhope, the leader of Conservative MEPs in Brussels, said: “Britain stands to lose its central pillar of its sovereignty: the ability to decide who can and can’t enter the UK.

“There are many things the EU can do to help growing immigration concerns but such decisions should be based on goodwill from other national governments, not on decisions forced on governments by Brussels.”

Jacques Barrot, the European Commission’s justice commissioner, said the system would “eliminate differences” and set out procedures to follow to avoid unequal treatment.

He said the plans were designed to ensure asylum seekers would have the same chance of being accepted or rejected in all EU countries.

“Our proposals represent a major step forward towards achieving higher standards of protection, a more level playing field as well as coherence for the system,” he said. Under the new rules, authorities would be forced to present asylum seekers with clear information on their rights as soon as they arrived in a country.

The authorities would then be expected to apply the common criteria for admission “robustly” and to “identify more quickly persons in need of protection and those who are not”.

The EU has made it clear it would like the allocation of asylum seekers to be “proportionate” based on population so that each country “shares the burden” of asylum applications.

Bigger countries such as Britain would be expected to take a larger share because of their size. Critics say this could see Britain being “forced” to accept refugees from “overburdened” countries such as Malta, which has seen a surge in asylum seekers from North Africa.

At present, the time taken to process applications differs from several weeks in some EU countries to up to 12 months in others. Under the proposals, the commission said all member states would process applications for asylum within six months.

Critics said the policy would end Britain’s right to determine its own asylum policy.

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, said: “The mainstream political parties can no longer pretend they have any control over our borders.

“On the day that the Office for National Statistics has made it clear that our population is increasing faster than ever before, with two-thirds of that increase attributed to immigration, the commission makes it clear that there is nothing we can do to halt the rise.”

Phil Woolas, the Borders and Immigration Minister, said: “We will consider and scrutinise the details of the proposals very carefully and will apply a very cautious attitude.” The proposals will be discussed by the European Parliament in November.

A second term – but at what price?

Source:EuropeanVoice.com

By Simon Taylor

In the end, José Manuel Barroso had to make few concessions to win the backing of a majority of MEPs for a second term as European Commission president. The greatest sacrifice he made was the time and energy he invested in drawing up his policy guidelines and appearing in front of the groups to convince them to support him.

Barroso pitched his programme squarely at the centre-right majority in the Parliament, incorporating a few additional sweeteners to Guy Verhofstadt’s liberal ALDE group, but little of substance to Martin Schulz’s Socialists and Democrats (S&D). The Greens, the last hold-out for the stop-Barroso camp, got nothing.

Without a credible alternative candidate to Barroso, the arguments among the political groups were going to be more about “programme than personality”, as Verhofstadt admitted in July after ALDE started discussing whether to support Barroso.

Verhofstadt secured the greatest number of concessions, winning extra ground on three of the demands on his five-point list. Barroso agreed to create a commissioner in charge of fundamental rights, by splitting it out of the justice, liberty and security portfolio. He also agreed to a mid-term review of the new system for financial market supervision now in preparation, and promised a “tough fight” to secure resources for the EU’s budget for the post-2014 period.

In reality, Verhofstadt’s original five demands went further than most of his group wanted, especially the free market German Liberals who were not happy with their leader’s wish to see some sort of new EU tax to finance the budget. Verhofstadt would not have had his group’s support for toughing it out on that issue or on a single financial market regulator.

Portfolio changes

Barroso’s willingness to accede to the demand for a commissioner exclusively responsible for fundamental rights suggests that the idea fitted with his own thinking about dividing up the portfolios in the next Commission. Inevitably, this has intensified speculation about how much tougher such a commissioner might be on countries such as Italy when they are accused of failing to respect international law on the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers.

A crucial element in convincing the Liberal MEPs to back Barroso and confirm him this week has been the growing realisation, that further delay (ALDE opposed the centre-right European People’s Party call for a vote in July) risked leaving the EU with a lame-duck Commission in important international discussions – such as the United Nations December summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or the talks on new global rules for financial markets.

New Commission

The vote this week means that Barroso can start assembling his new Commission team in October. The candidate commissioners will go before MEPs for their hearings in November, and they could be confirmed in December. German Liberal Democrat MEP Alexander Graf Lambsdorff said the Liberals and Conservatives had “secured the ability of the EU to act” by deciding to vote this week. “Opponents of a vote would have left the EU without leadership in the continuing economic crisis”, he said.

Martin Schulz, the S&D leader, admitted last week that his group was in a “weak position” because of its poor performance in the June European Parliament elections.

Schulz had presented Barroso with an 11-point plan, but Barroso, while claiming that the fight against unemployment was his main priority, addressed only two of the Socialists’ demands – on the posting of workers and social impact assessments. He ignored a long-standing demand to present a framework directive to protect public services against privatisation, and offered no response to calls for pacts to protect jobs. Barroso knew that he would get some votes from some Spanish, Portuguese and UK Socialist MEPs, but that the support of the group was not within reach even if he had made all kinds of promises to protect jobs. And any such commitments would have lost him otherwise reliable support from the centre-right and the Liberals.

During a heated session with the Green group, Barroso had to fight off constant accusations that he was a puppet of the member states and a slave to industry. But Barroso had never deluded himself about getting their support and he offered them nothing new.

Barroso’s policy guidelines and the extra concessions he made last week to the groups were carefully calibrated to satisfy the centre-right majority in the Parliament. The Liberals have won the most concessions, though modest, while the centre-left and Greens have not been able to force Barroso to revise his programme substantially – an outcome that reflects their voting weight in Parliament.

MEPs are gratified by the gesture that the next president of the Commission made in outlining his programme to them. The most important result of the time and energy Barroso has invested is that he has obtained clear political support for his programme from a Parliament that been critical of the attention he pays to member states and their priorities.

EU-Mugabe Meeting Fails to Resolve Sanctions Issue

By Ish Mufundikwa

President Robert Mugabe has met with a European Union delegation, the first such meeting since 2002 when the EU imposed sanctions on Mr. Mugabe and senior individuals in his party and government for alleged human rights abuses. The parties failed to agree on the lifting of sanctions as demanded by the Zimbabwean government.

President Mugabe emerged from the more than one hour meeting and told journalists the meeting was held in a friendly atmosphere but the sanctions issue had not been resolved. He said the EU demands that the Global Political Agreement that brought about the unity government be implemented are groundless.

” Everything that we were asked to do under the GPA we have done and done timeously even.  It is other matters of course that one might regard as constituting the spirit and environment in which the GPA should work which must now be attended to,” he said.

Mr. Mugabe blamed the sanctions for Zimbabwe’s long-running economic problems. When reminded that the sanctions targeted him and his inner circle he pointed out that he was still in power but the country’s ordinary people were suffering.

“Sanctions have had a real effect on the performance of our industries, mining manufacturing, we can’t get spare parts, we can’t get credit lines and we are blocked in regard to aid from the IMF and World Bank,” he said.

Sweden’s Development Minister Gunilla Carlsson, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, reiterated the EU stance that the sanctions are not against Zimbabwe. She said contacts with the Zimbabwean government will continue and the removal of the measures against Mr. Mugabe and others would depend on a number of issues being resolved.

“There are several and the implementation must now be conducted in a good way and we have discussed human rights violations, we have discussed the need for free media and some other things,” said Carlsson.

The EU team, which leaves Zimbabwe on Sunday, is still to meet with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Mr. Tsvangirai wants the removal of sanctions to be conditional on the full implementation of the deal that brought about the unity government.

EU meets Mugabe to ease tension with Zimbabwe

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