WE COULD SEND ASYLUM SEEKERS TO EGYPT
Concerns EU pact will be like the UK’s Rwanda plan
THERE are growing concerns over Ireland’s intention to join EU plans to process asylum-seeker claims in ‘safe third countries’ in North Africa and the Middle East.
In Washington this week, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar indicated he ‘supports’ the plans by the European People’s Party (EPP) in the EU Parliament as part of an EU-wide migration pact.
But the plans – which would see asylum seekers deported to countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia to have their applications processed – have been likened to the UK’s Rwanda policy, which Tánaiste Micheál Martin called ‘shocking’ and ‘wrong’ in 2022.
Social Democrats TD Jennifer
‘It would be hard to ensure it’s humane’
Whitmore told the Irish Daily Mail that she would have ‘serious concerns’ about outsourcing the asylum process to another state.
‘It would be very hard to ensure that the process and conditions are suitable and humane. Other countries have tried this, such as Australia, and it didn’t work either,’ she said.
Ms Whitmore added that it is ‘really important that we come up with a system that’s fair and efficient because the issue of immigration isn’t going to go away. It’s going to be a feature of living in a global word’.
The CEO of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Brian Killoran, also raised concerns about ‘outsourcing’ the EU’s immigration screening.
Mr Killoran said there was ‘revulsion’ at the UK proposals in deporting unprocessed migrants to Rwanda, which he said ‘has been bogged down in the courts and legally challenged, and rightly so’.
He said the human rights records and standards in third countries to date have been problematic. ‘In some ways it has been a politically motivated approach, which sounds good to the public but from a human rights perspective, it is not a good way of processing people in vulnerable situations,’ he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
EU leaders meet in Brussels next week where they are expected to ratify the EU Migration Pact. It is the first common agreement reached on migration by the 27 member states.
Under the proposals, the EU’s borders will be strengthened with asylum applications being assessed in ‘safe third countries.
Last week the EPP, of which Fine Gael is a member, proposed deporting asylum seekers to ‘safe third countries’, to have their applications processed.
Speaking in Washington, the Fine Gael leader said he ‘supports’ the EPP proposal but that it would form part of the EU pact and that Ireland would have to decide whether to sign up to it or not.
‘It’s not an EPP proposal that people would vote for or against in the European elections, it’s something that’s already envisaged in the EU Asylum and Migration Pact which Ireland has to decide whether we opt into or not,’ he said.
Mr Varadkar said that the EPP supports this approach ‘but it has to be done in line with the Geneva Conventions and the European Convention on Human Rights’.
He previously said these conditions made it distinct from the UK’s Rwanda policy, which was found to breach the ECHR.
Mr Varadkar said: ‘Increasingly migration is a big part of our politics, [whereas it] hadn’t been previously. Now it’s definitely a toptier issue or a top-three issue. So they’re the things that are on people’s minds and of course, therefore they’re on politicians’ minds.’
‘Migration is a big part of our politics’
Mr Varadkar said the EU pact would see it ‘coming to agreements’ with countries on its borders like Turkey ‘to assist them financially to increase and improve border controls and also to establish centres in transit countries where International Protection Applicants could be processed’.
Under the proposals being considered, asylum seekers rescued crossing the Mediterranean, destined for Italy, would be brought to Albania to have their asylum applications processed.
Other countries that are currently under consideration for use in the EU scheme are Egypt and Algeria.
Under the pact an EU country could choose not to accept asylum seekers and have then redistributed elsewhere in the EU at a cost of €30,000 per person.
The Taoiseach said: ‘These are actually not problems that were created in Ireland or can be solved in Ireland alone.’
‘They’re part of bigger things that are happening in the world and we have to understand that a lot of the solutions to the problems that we see in our dayto-day lives in Ireland, or here in America, require multilateral solutions and require global solutions, and it can be hard to explain that sometimes.’