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In the course of her State of the Union speech, held yesterday in the European Parliament, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that she intends to reform the Dublin regulation, the legislative bottleneck that has thousands people in Italy and Greece. migrants arriving by sea, which immigration experts consider outdated and ineffective. Von der Leyen added that the Commission will present a specific proposal on September 23, one day before the European Council, the meeting of the EU Heads of State and Government, scheduled for September 24.
Although the details of the proposal are not yet known, therefore, not even its chances of being approved, in the past both Parliament and the Commission had repeatedly tried to amend the Regulation, always meeting the opposition of the Council of the Union Europe, the body where the governments of the national states are represented – von der Leyen’s words were so clear and ambitious that we have again spoken of them in a concrete way.
What the Dublin Regulation says
The Dublin Convention was signed in 1990 by 12 states of the European Union and entered into force on September 1, 1997 in the form of a regulation, that is, a binding European law for all states that are part of the Union. This is the process of clarifying which state should examine an asylum seeker’s application and therefore host it for the duration of the practice, once it has entered the territory of the European Union.
Basically, the Convention was born to adopt a common practice throughout Europe and prevent an asylum seeker from applying in various states of the Union, creating confusion and conflicts of responsibility. The first Convention included two key points:
one. The State in charge of managing the asylum application of each asylum seeker is the one in which their close relatives legally reside, or from which they have already obtained a residence permit.
two. In the absence of established links, the State that is in charge of the application and reception is the first in which the asylum seeker sets foot.
Over the years, the second point has become increasingly relevant, so much so that the first is overshadowed: both for practical reasons – costly transfers between states are avoided – and because it is often difficult to know family ties between two people who live thousands of miles apart, whose searches involve three administrative bodies speaking different languages (try to put a Swedish, a Greek and a Malian in the same room).
Because it does not work?
On the one hand, the Dublin rules are old: neglecting the small changes implemented in 2003 and 2013, they have remained practically the same for thirty years, when the European Union did not yet exist. Furthermore, the Dublin rules were conceived by envisioning regular flows of asylum seekers and substantial complicity and common standards in all EU countries: in this way, once fully operational, applicants with family ties would be transferred to the competent countries. , and those without particular ties would have been received “spontaneously” in border countries.
As flows increased, as happened from 2013, it became clear that the system would not hold. In 2015, so many people arrived from the Middle East and North Africa, fleeing war and violence, that Greek and Italian authorities temporarily stopped recording arrivals.
The main problems of the Regulation are three: the first is the excessive burden for border countries, which, especially in case of increased flows, have to allocate large amounts to manage and welcome incoming applicants, examine their practices, host them for months or years waiting for the final decision, etc. In 2017, the last year of massive influx to Italy before the Gentiloni government decided to entrust the task of detaining migrants to armed militias in Libya, Italy spent around 4.3 billion for the reception of asylum seekers. . euro, a figure comparable to a small fiscal maneuver (although mitigated by some European funding).
The second problem concerns the inefficiency of the entire system. The majority of asylum seekers who arrive in Italy, Greece and Spain, the most involved border countries, do not aspire to stay there, but to move to countries where they speak a language they know, where the labor market is less rigid. and where you already have a network of compatriots among distant relatives and friends. In Italy, among other things, the main forms of protection for asylum seekers, which last a maximum of a few years, cannot be converted into residence permits for work reasons: it means that even the luckiest asylum seekers rarely manage to obtain permanent permits that allow them to plan a life in Italy and integrate in all aspects.
Dublin’s third problem concerns the rights of asylum seekers. Entrusting all the management of the system to a few countries, without a homogeneous redistribution, ensures that the national authorities of Italy, Greece and Spain are overloaded with practices – even in periods of less flow – and struggle to make decisions in acceptable times. , prolonging limbo and situations of vulnerability find asylum seekers: above all those who await a decision on their application in the refugee camps of the Greek islands, in inhuman conditions.
Reform attempts
The most concrete attempt to reform the Dublin regulation started in 2015 in the European Parliament. After two years of intense negotiations, in 2017 the Parliament approved with a transversal majority that goes from the center right to the radical left a proposal that aimed at a greater distribution of the reception of asylum seekers by all European countries, in addition to those on the border and those most implicated in the influx for historical reasons (France and Germany).
The most important point of the reform contemplated the elimination of the “first entry” criterion and its replacement by a mandatory mechanism for the distribution of asylum seekers among the 27 states of the Union. The maximum number of asylum seekers to receive would be established by a quota, different for each country, depending on the GDP and the population. In the reform there were also rules that responded to some needs reported by those who work with asylum seekers, such as the possibility of inserting a preference on the state in which they will stay, and measures requested by more prudent MEPs, such as a transition period of three years before the final introduction of the quotas.
The reform was approved in the European Parliament – despite the abstention of the League and the vote against the 5 Star Movement – and was accepted by the European Commission, which had drawn up the basic text, but was blocked in the Council of the European Union. the body where the national governments of the 27 countries are represented. Eastern countries have always opposed the approval of the reform, traditionally hostile to the reception of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
A year later, in 2018, Bulgaria proposed a new compromise during its six-month presidency of the Council of the Union, but this time it was the border countries that expressed the greatest perplexity: the Bulgarian proposal envisaged a transition period of ten years. before the entry into force of the quotas, considered excessive by Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta.
What can change this time?
It is not clear. In yesterday’s speech von der Leyen was very vague, and limited himself to saying that in the Commission’s intention the Regulation will be replaced by “a strong solidarity mechanism”, that the new system will be more “humane” and that the states nationals will have to prepare to “rebuild trust in others”: generic formulas that do not let much escape, not even on the issue of mandatory quotas on which the last Parliament and the last Commission substantially agreed.
The main obstacle continues to be the opposition of the Eastern countries. In addition, none of the most intransigent has changed government compared to 2017: just a few weeks ago, the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, head of a semi-authoritarian government, expected that the eastern countries would continue to reject the “experiments” of the Western European Society. , which includes “rainbow families, immigration, and open societies.”
The proposal that the Commission will present on September 23 will be evaluated by national governments in the coming weeks. In July, the German government, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council until December, announced that it wanted to reach an agreement on the reform of the Dublin Regulation by the end of the year, but since then no concrete proposals or bases for negotiation have emerged.
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