2023-12-20 09:18:02
BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union negotiators reached agreement Wednesday on the core elements of overhauling its outdated asylum policy, paving the way for a final agreement before European elections in June.
Delegates from the member states, the European Parliament and the executive branch, the European Commission, “reached an agreement on the central political elements” of the Pact on Migration and Asylum, according to the Spanish presidency of the EU in a statement after a night of talks.
The pact was presented as the answer to the EU’s migration problems when it was announced in September 2020. The bloc’s old rules collapsed in 2015 when more than a million people arrived in Europe without authorization. Most were fleeing the war in Syria or Iraq.
But little progress has been made on the document since then, amid disputes by member states over which country should take care of migrants when they arrive and whether other countries should be obliged to help.
The presidency noted that negotiators had brought closer positions on issues such as the filtering of migrants who arrive without authorization, the ways in which their biometric data is used, the rules that determine which EU countries must process asylum applications and the procedures to do so.
In recent years, as hope for reform faded, the EU focused on outsourcing the task and reached agreements with countries of origin or transit. A recent example is the agreement with Tunisia, where authorities have been accused of abandoning migrants in the desert.
Time is running out to reach an agreement on asylum. There will be elections to the European Parliament in all member states between June 6 and 9. For the plan to come into effect, authorities and legislators have said they had to reach a final agreement on its 10 parts by February.
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