Third country cooperation in the EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum
By Annick Pijnenburg and Lynn Hillary
One of the aims of the EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum (hereafter: Pact) is to reduce unsafe and irregular migration routes. In that respect, the European Commission rightly notes that the internal and external dimension of migration are inextricably linked. It is therefore unsurprising that cooperation with third countries forms an important element of the new proposals that constitute the Pact. Section 6 of the Commission’s Communication, which is titled ‘Working with our international partners’, covers almost a third of the total document. Indeed, while the Pact is a compromise regarding the Common European Asylum System (hereafter: CEAS), i.e. the internal dimension of migration, this is not completely true for the Pact’s elements on cooperation with third countries, and externalisation more generally. Here, the Member States of the EU seem to be very much in unison. It has been argued this is the case because external migration management is focused on deterrence, thereby decreasing the number of migrants that any Member State is responsible for. In other words, if the CEAS were a well-functioning system, there would be no need to rely as heavily on externalisation as is the case in the current proposals.
Blog series: EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum
Introductory blog
By Lynn Hillary
Credits: By EmDee - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Dear reader of Human Rights Here,
In September 2020, the European Commission unveiled the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, a series of long-awaited measures to reform the EU migration regime. On November 23rd the Migration & Borders Working Group of the NNHRR gathered with migration scholars of Tilburg University to discuss several aspects of the EU New Pact.
The pact aims to ‘rebuild trust between Member States and to restore citizens' confidence in our capacity to manage migration as a Union.’ Commission President von der Leyen also stressed that ‘[i]t is now time to rise to the challenge to manage migration jointly, with the right balance between solidarity and responsibility.’
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