Committee calls for debate on latest EU asylum reform proposals

20 September 2016

European Scrutiny Committee calls for debate on latest EU asylum reform proposals.

Recommendations

The European Scrutiny Committee is recommending that the Commission's latest asylum reform proposals should be debated on the floor of the House. These proposals would:

Revise EU rules on who qualifies for international protection
Establish a fully harmonised common EU asylum procedure
Revise EU rules on reception conditions for asylum seekers
Establish a new EU framework for the resettlement of individuals in need of international protection

Background

In 2015 more than a million people — a quarter of them children — risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean to Europe and more than 1.2 million asylum applications were made in EU Member States. The European Commission expects migration to remain "one of the defining issues for Europe" for decades to come.

The common European asylum system — a work in progress since 2003 — provides a framework for managing the refugee crisis but many regard it as broken, or seriously weakened, as a result of unilateral action taken by Member States to protect their borders, restrict access to their territories and make it more difficult to obtain protection.

"Asylum shopping"

The European Commission has presented a comprehensive package of asylum reforms. The proposed reforms are intended to reduce the scope for differential treatment of refugees, depending on where an application for international protection is made within the EU, deter "asylum shopping" and secondary movements between Member States, and establish effective burden-sharing and solidarity mechanisms to ease the pressure on frontline Member States.

The UK participates in some, but not all, of the EU's existing asylum laws. All the Commission's asylum reform proposals are subject to the UK's justice and home affairs opt-in, meaning that the UK will only be bound if the Government decides to opt in.

The current proposals are linked to reforms presented in May which seek to streamline the existing Dublin rules (establishing procedures to allocate responsibility for examining each asylum application made in the EU to a single Member State) and include a new “fairness mechanism” designed to ensure a more equitable distribution of asylum seekers amongst Member States. The earlier proposals would also transform the European Asylum Support Office into the EU Agency for Asylum, giving it a stronger mandate to monitor the overall functioning of the common European asylum system, and develop the EU's asylum database (Eurodac) into a broader migration management tool. The Committee has previously recommended that these proposals should also be debated on the floor of the House.

The Committee says:

Full Parliamentary scrutiny of the Government's opt-in decisions is important. There can be little doubt that a decision to opt into all of the Commission's asylum reform proposals would have a substantial impact on the UK's asylum system. Whilst such a wide-ranging opt-in may seem unlikely, given the UK's patchwork participation in current EU asylum measures as well as the outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, the legal, practical and political feasibility of opting into some of the proposals but not others is far from clear. It is also unclear whether the UK could continue to take part in existing EU asylum measures, such as the Dublin rules which are broadly favourable for the UK, if it does not opt into the new replacement measure.

The Committee continues:

Even if the Government were to recommend that the UK should not opt into any elements of the asylum reform package, the Commission's attempt to establish “an integrated, sustainable and holistic migration policy, based on solidarity and fair sharing of responsibilities, which can function effectively in times of calm and crisis” is likely to have an impact on the UK's own asylum system, both in the period while the UK remains a member of the European Union and after it has left. As the situation in Calais demonstrates, the asylum policies and systems in place in other Member States have an important bearing on the flow of asylum seekers and irregular migrants seeking to enter the UK.

Questions to Government

Amongst the questions the Committee asks the Government to address in the debate are:

What impact different asylum rules in the UK and the EU might be expected to have on the UK asylum system post-Brexit?
Whether there are any elements of the Commission's reform package which the Government would wish to replicate in domestic asylum law?
Whether it would be possible to prevent secondary movements on the scale witnessed in recent months and discourage “asylum shopping” by regulating at national level, without further EU intervention?

Further information

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