EU’s migrant projects chaotic

Aid to halt flood having little impact – auditors

EUROPEAN Union aid to halt migration is so poorly managed that president Jean-Claude Juncker’s officials are unable to say how much has been spent, a scathing report has found.

The finding by the European Court of Auditors came as leaders gathered in Brussels to haggle over £4.7-billion (R104-billion) of aid to Turkey.

Britain is prepared to pay its share in exchange for Turkey accepting the deportation of tens of thousands of asylum seekers and economic migrants.

An estimated ß1.4- billion (R24.3-billion) of EU overseas aid was spent in countries such as Algeria, Georgia, Moldova, Morocco and Ukraine on Europe’s periphery to halt migration between 2007 and 2013.

But the report warned the projects are poorly designed, badly managed, chaotically supervised and, as a result, often ineffective.

A ß3- million (R52-million) project in Georgia to help deported migrants found permanent jobs for just 83 people out of a target of 700, while just 13 migrants used temporary accommodation designed for 180 people.

Significantly for the Turkey deal, it found that ß20- million (R347-million) worth of projects to deport migrants back to the EU’s neighbouring states were having little impact.

It also warned that the EU was paying only lip-service to human rights concerns.

“Respect for human rights, which should underpin all actions, remains theoretical and is only rarely translated in practice,” it said.

It found that a ß10- million (R173-million) project in the Sahara to intercept migrants before they could reach Europe contained no thought about a mechanism for responding to human rights violations.

It was suspended amid protests from charities and reports that found numerous human rights violations in detention centres.

EU-funded projects in awful Ukrainian detention centres contained no training on compliance with international human rights law, despite the treatment of detainees being repeatedly criticised by international organisa- tions, the report said.

Despite being a major piece of the EU’s foreign policy, the EU has no precise data on spending to halt migration, due to leaving the auditors to make their own assessment from EU accounts.

It was impossible to determine total expenditure, the report said. Overall, there was no clear strategy.

The EU spent ß8.6- billion (R149-billion) in foreign aid in 2014, of which around an eighth comes from the UK.

Two-thirds of the 23 projects the auditors examined only partly met their goals.

“This was often due to their excessively vague or general nature, which frequently made it impossible to measure results,” the court said.

It also found that the EU’s internal auditing reports on the projects rarely listed the results they achieved, while the targets listed in the budgets changed from one year to the next or were poorly documented.

“Consequently, policy results could not be monitored or correctly reported in a comprehensive and coordinated manner”. – The Telegraph