EU Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy Droit et Politique de l'Immigration et de l'Asile de l'UE

By Catherine Warin, PhD (University of Luxembourg), co-founder and president of Passerell, vice-president of the Luxembourg Bar’s immigration and asylum commission; author of Individual Rights under European Union Law. A study on the relation between rights, obligations and interests in the case law of the Court of Justice (Nomos, 2019).

Individual rights have been a key concept of EU law ever since the CJEU laid down its methodology for identifying such rights in Van Gend en Loos and Defrenne. These founding cases made clear that individual rights are correlatives of obligations laid down by EU law, and are triggered into existence by individual interests in the fulfilment of these obligations. Awareness of this relationship between rights, obligations and interests allows to think about rights in a flexible and coherent manner, which is essential in the increasingly complex field of EU migration law. 

The dynamic correlation between rights and obligations 

The correlation between rights and obligations is key for identifying rights in primary and secondary EU law. Just like in the legal theory of rights inspired by Hohfeld’s influential work, one obligation and the corresponding right can be characterized as two sides of the same coin: rights can be deduced from obligations, and conversely, the ‘obligational’ aspect of a norm can be deduced from the right that it expressly grants. When considering rights in EU law, however, it is important to stress that this correlation functions in a dynamic way. It is not a tool for abstractly determining whether a given provision gives rise to rights; rather, it means that the degree of discretion allowed by the provision (assessed by looking at clues such as clarity, unconditionality, and precision) is inversely proportional to the probability of identifying a right in concrete circumstances. 

By way of illustration, consider Baumbast, a classic case on the free movement and residence of EU citizens: the CJEU therein held that the right to reside within the territory of the Member States under Article 18(1) EC (now 21(1) TFEU) ‘is conferred directly on every citizen of the Union by a clear and precise provision of the EC Treaty’ and that Mr Baumbast could rely on this provision, ‘purely (as) a citizen of the Union’. This right is not unconditional, since it ‘is conferred subject to the limitations and conditions laid down by the Treaty and by the measures adopted to give it effect’; however, ‘those limitations and conditions must be applied in compliance with the limits imposed by Community law (…)’. I.e., the provisions on EU citizenship give rise to rights in so far as they are clear and precise, and, if they are not unconditional, when the required conditions are satisfied.

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Niovi Vavoula*

*I am indebted to Prof. Kees Groenendijk for his valuable comments on a previous draft of this blog post. Many thanks also to Teresa Quintel for reading through this blog post. An annotation in Dutch will be published by Evelien Brouwer in issue 16 of Jurisprudentie Vreemdelingenrecht.

Introduction

In the aftermath of Digital Rights Ireland -the landmark ruling that invalidated Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of telecommunications metadata for law enforcement purposes– Steve Peers heralded a new era of ‘privacy spring’. Indeed, since then, a series of important judgments –such as Schrems Tele2 and Opinion 1/15– have been released, affirming the prime importance of the rights of private life and personal data protection particularly in the law enforcement context. However, the Luxembourg Court’s judgment of 3 October 2019 in the case of A, B and P  leads us to wonder whether in the case of third-country nationals we are still amidst the ‘privacy winter’.

Facts

The facts of the case involve two Turkish nationals. The first one, Mr A, required a temporary residence permit after taking up employment in the Netherlands. The second one Mr B, married to dual national (Turkish—Dutch) Ms Pa, applied for a temporary residence permit for family reunification. In both cases, in accordance with Article 106a(1) of the Vreemdelingenwet 2000 (Law on Foreign Nationals), the issuance of the permit was made conditional upon the collection, recording and retention of specific biometric data -a full set of fingerprints and facial image- in a central filing system. The applicants lodged appeals concerning this requirement, which the Staatsecretaris dismissed. As a result actions were brought before the District Court of The Hague. While that Court declared those actions well founded, on appeal, the Dutch Council of State decided to stay the proceedings and refer the case to the Court of Justice.

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The Odysseus Network organised with the European Policy Centre (EPC) and the EMN Finland its annual conference “From Tampere 20 to Tampere 2.0: Towards a new programme (2020-2024) for EU Migration and Asylum Policies 20 years after the Tampere conclusions” in Helsinki on 24 and 25 October in connection with Finlands EU Presidency. The outcome is presented this Monday 2 December to the Libe Committee of the European Parliament and will be available on our website as from the 11th of December after the publication’s launch. The present post is part of the contribution of Philippe De Bruycker to the conference. The author warmly thanks Jean-Louis De Brouwer for his contribution and precious advice, as well as Marie De Somer for her review of the text.

Philippe DE BRUYCKER

The crisis of 2015-16 challenged the entire migration and asylum policies of the EU and its member states. The rules patiently built over 15 years tumbled down like a house of cards. Despite the European Commission’s 2015 Agenda on Migration launched in reaction, the EU plunged into a multi-dimensional – political, moral, legal, institutional, financial – crisis:

• Some member states openly refused to apply some of the solidarity measures, like the relocation of asylum seekers, despite it being adopted as a legally binding decision, thereby violating the rule of law upon which the EU is built.
• Member states re-established within the Schengen area which is one of the foundations of the EU, internal border controls without consideration of the limitations imposed by the Schengen Borders Code.
• The EU and member states’ support to third countries of transit for migrants led to violations of their basic human rights, involving inhuman or degrading treatments and arbitrary detention like in the case of Libya.

Nonetheless, the crisis is over, and the issue of the disembarkation of some hundreds of persons rescued at sea should not be instrumentalised to convince the public that it is still ongoing. Despite its negative effect on the political climate, the crisis acted as a catalyst and can be transformed into an opportunity as it has often been the case for the EU in the past. It is therefore more than welcome that the new President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has announced her willingness to propose the conclusion of a “New Pact on Migration and Asylum”. Due to the existential character of this crisis, rather than another impetus, it is a new European consensus that is needed and should be concluded between the member states and the EU institutions. After a brief assessment of the implementation of the Tampere conclusions (1), we present the building blocks upon which this new consensus could be established in order to build migration and asylum policies sustainable for the future (2) before making a proposal regarding the methodology that could be used (3).

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Thomas Spijkerboer & Elies Steyger

Elies Steyger is professor of European administrative law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Thomas Spijkerboer is professor of migration law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Raoul Wallenberg visiting professor of human rights and humanitarian law at Lund University; his research for this article was funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation

In 2014-2015, the European Union adopted three financial measures in order to cooperate with neighbouring countries in the field of migration policy. By July 2019, the Trust Fund in response to the Syrian crisis, also called the Madad Fund, was worth a total of €1.8 billion; the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for stability and addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa was worth €4.6 billion; and the Facility for Refugees in Turkey €5.6 billion. The European external migration funds are subject to the ordinary public procurement rules to which both the member states and EU institutions themselves are subject. This requires open, transparent and objective procedures so as to open up markets for public contracts, stimulating competition and therefore quality of contractors and the proper spending of public money.

However, for the projects implemented through these financial measures, there is often no open competition. Instead, potential implementing partners bring their projects to the attention of EU delegations in the country concerned and the European Commission. These carry out a first scrutiny of potential projects. Subsequently, an informal expert group carries out an examination of the project proposals. In the background, there is an on-going negotiation between the Commission, the EU Member States, the third country involved and sometimes the potential implementing partner. In the words of the European Court of Auditors, the selection of projects is “not fully consistent and clear.” Others have called it “opaque.”

In light of these concerns about the transparency of the way in which public funds are spent, we have analysed in an article published in European Papers how expenditure under the migration funds relates to European public procurement law.

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Minos Mouzourakis, ECRE, and Refugee Support Aegean (RSA)

Unlawful deprivation of liberty is a longstanding and amply highlighted concern in the Greek asylum system. Greece consistently resorts to systematic detention of people seeking international protection at its borders and on its soil. In 2018, during which 66,969 applicants registered claims with the Asylum Service, the Hellenic Police detained 18,204 asylum seekers in pre-removal detention centres alone, while holding many more in unsuitable police stations. This is almost double the number of asylum seekers held in pre-removal centres in 2017 (9,534). Albeit reflecting only part of detention landscape in the country, these figures reveal the continuation of a policy of migration management largely based on coercion.

Against that backdrop, the latest iteration of hasty reform of asylum legislation introduced by the Greek government to “amend the detention regime in order to avoid thousands of foreigners evading authorities’ oversight” should give one pause. The International Protection Act (Greek IPA), approved by the Parliament on 31 October 2019 within two weeks of presentation of a bill to a truncated public consultation, has attracted deep concerns from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil society organisations (e.g. Refugee Support Aegean, Greek Council for Refugees, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch). Critiques point to the government’s doubling down on coercive measures and weakening procedural guarantees in the areas of reception and asylum procedures. They also flag the lack of prior evaluation of the successive asylum reforms carried out in recent years and of due justification for new legislation.

Various provisions of the Greek IPA further undermine the right to liberty in Greece by pushing the legal boundaries of detention of asylum seekers, by entrenching previously blurred boundaries  as well as  by seemingly introducing new places of detention. While the exact impact of the reform is yet to be seen in practice, the changes made to the domestic framework are liable to expose more people seeking refuge to the damaging effects of detention.

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By Daniel Thym, Universität Konstanz

Notwithstanding a lack of popular support, the German government managed to bring a rather extensive set of eight bills on immigration through parliament before the 2019 summer break. This blogpost aims at introducing the core piece of legislation of Germany’s recent migration package to a transnational audience: the Skilled Immigration Act, which indicates the determination of the largest Member State not to confine migration policy reform to supranational harmonisation, even though the reform step may reinforce the international debate about legal migration and its interaction with the asylum system. Closer inspection of the Skilled Immigration Act also offers insights into specificities of the German debate.

By contrast, other elements of the migration package do not raise many issues that are relevant for the pan-European debate, since they essentially implement or complement existing EU rules. Some measures were however politically contested and raise important legal questions, but their effects are often specific to the German context. Those who want to learn more about corresponding measures on the regularisation of illegal stay, return and detention, the residence requirement for beneficiaries of international protection or deprivation of nationality are invited to consult the reports submitted by experts to the parliamentary hearing.

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