European Union

A 27-year-old jihadist from Tajikistan has been arrested by Greece’s Counter-Terrorism Service, Greek media reported on Thursday. The 27-year-old was an ISIS fighter and was in the lists of Interpol. He is a father of four children, who had come...

French president Emmanuel Macron has pledged deep reform of free movement in the EU in the wake of recent terrorist attacks.

Belgian police seized 11.5 tonnes of pure cocaine hidden in a scrap metal container in the country's single biggest-ever haul, prosecutors said on Thursday (5 November).

Reversing damaging incentives to burn wood for heat and power is crucial if the EU wants to remain a leader on climate and biodiversity, argue Annika Lund Gade and Peter de Jong.

The World Health Organisation in Europe said on Thursday it was seeing an "explosion" of coronavirus cases on the continent and warned of a "tough time" ahead as mortality rates rose, AFP reports. "We do see an explosion ... in the sense it only takes a couple of days to have over the European region an increase of one million cases," WHO's regional director for Europe Hans Kluge said.

EU politicians have cautioned against thinking the US would make a full U-turn toward Europe even if Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden wins.

Members of the World Trade Organisation are likely to appoint Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the trade body’s director general next week despite attempts by US President Donald Trump to block the former Nigerian finance minister.

In Paris, 84 patients with the coronavirus died Wednesday in its hospitals, which are at 92 percent capacity, with 1,050 Covid-19 patients in intensive care and another 600 patients in ICU with other ailments, AP news agency reports. With more than 27,000 people hospitalised across France, Covid-19 patients occupy more than 80 percent of the nation's ICU beds, according to the public health agency, the highest level since April.

Norway's environmental groups, including Greenpeace and Youth Norway, have argued that new licences for exploratory oil-drilling violate a constitutional right to a healthy environment, the New York Times reported on Thursday. After two lower courts previously rejected invalidating the exploration licences issued by the government, the Supreme Court has been asked to confront this apparent contradiction to the country's constitution's environmental provisions.

The deal means MEPs and the German EU presidency unblocked a major political hurdle to agreeing on the €1.8 trillion long-term EU budget and coronavirus recovery package.

A group of 70 NGOs has urged the European Commission to ban the export to third countries of pesticides prohibited inside Europe - and stop the import of food produced with such pesticides from outside the bloc.

The European Council has not kept any text messages or another type of instant messaging from its president to heads of state. It says nothing qualified to have them registered for public access. Transparency campaigners disagree.

Today the temperature is rising 20 percent faster in the Mediterranean region than the rest of the world. This is one of challenges to be discussed by the Interreg MED conference on Friday (6 November).

An outcry from major European city governments - including Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Budapest - has helped shelve an EU Commission power grab over municipalities' services industries, such as in affordable housing, energy supply and waste management.

As if dealing with a pandemic wasn’t enough, from the very outbreak of Covid-19, institutions, political leaders, social and traditional media alike seem to have used the pandemic to pit one generation against the other. Young people are being depicted...

Northern Ireland will not be ready to conduct checks on certain goods moving between Britain and the province from January as required by the Brexit divorce deal and is exploring contingency plans, an official report warned on Friday. The National...

The head of the OSCE observer mission to the US elections accused Donald Trump on Thursday (5 November) of a "gross abuse of office" after the president alleged he was being cheated and demanded that vote counting be halted.

As compromises go, the deal brokered between MEPs on linking the disbursement of EU funds to the rule of law back is a classic of the kind that Brussels specializes in.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi resigned Thursday following confirmation he was being charged with war crimes by an EU-sponsored special tribunal in The Hague, the AP news agency reports. He did it to protect the "integrity" of the presidential office, he said. "Kosovo was the victim and Serbia was the aggressor," he added, referring to Kosovo's war of independence from Serbia in the late 1990s, when he was a guerrilla leader.

Covid-19 has once again put EU solidarity to the test. While much of the focus has been on the pandemic’s impact on healthcare and the European economy, it has also pushed states further apart on the issue of irregular migration.

Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the issue of irregular migration had been at the top of the EU’s political agenda for over a decade. At the same time, the governance of migration proved to be the most complex and problematic area of governance in the EU due to the multiplicity of interests within the Union which are in constant flux.

Disagreement between EU leaders was brought to the fore during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-17 when the EU received the largest influx of irregular migrants since the end of the Second World War. Consequently, EU institutions and member states were unable to forge a common approach to deal with the crisis. Indeed, rather than developing a long-term strategy, a series of short-term ad hoc measures were implemented, which ultimately failed to alleviate pressure on those member states facing high migration pressures.

The EU’s inability to develop a coherent response to the crisis resulted in political cleavages both between and within the national and supranational levels. This was primarily reflected in the deadlocked inter-institutional negotiations on the reform of the Dublin Regulation revolving around the question of whether to replace the ‘state of first entry’ rule with a mandatory relocation mechanism to distribute asylum seekers across EU member states. These cleavages were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic which further exposed serious flaws in EU migration governance as well as the EU’s limitations in the face of crisis.

EU institutions and member states have similarly failed to overcome their differences and pull together in the spirit of solidarity during the pandemic. Even though, unlike the asymmetrical impact of the ‘refugee crisis’, the pandemic has affected all states bar none. Still, following the outbreak of Covid-19, divisions have grown deeper within the EU in terms of its approach to irregular migration, stemming from the fact that policymaking in this field continues to be dominated by national concerns. Accordingly, the pandemic has further strained intergovernmental relations in the EU. Against this backdrop, the EU remains as divided as ever in terms of its response to irregular migration, despite irregular arrivals to Europe decreasing in the aftermath of the 2015-17 crisis.

While the governance of migration in the EU is becoming increasingly fragmented, it is also becoming increasingly restrictive towards irregular migrants. In this regard, the pandemic has augmented the perceived threat of irregular migrants as they are being increasingly viewed as spreaders, resulting in the implementation of more restrictive migration measures in most EU member states. For instance, Italy and Malta have closed their ports to persons rescued at sea for the duration of the health emergency. Both governments later stated that migrants rescued in the Mediterranean would be quarantined at sea in order to prevent the spread of the virus, sparking criticism from NGOs advocating migrants’ rights.

Restrictive measures taken by other member states included reintroducing internal border controls within the Schengen Area to prevent irregular secondary movements of migrants from neighbouring states under the guise of protecting public health. Certain states, such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden, have had border checks in place since the outbreak of the previous crisis in 2015.

Given that the main migratory routes into the EU are across the Mediterranean, the southern EU members have been at the forefront in dealing with the issue of irregular migration and hence have assumed a much higher degree of asylum responsibility. Furthermore, due to their geographical proximity to main departure points for irregular migrants, they are disadvantaged by the Dublin rules, which in most cases assign asylum responsibility to the first EU state in which an asylum seeker arrives. Nonetheless, as in previous years, appeals for solidarity by the southern member states have largely fallen on deaf ears.

One such case in point is the Malta Declaration agreed upon by Italy and Malta together with France and Germany in September 2019 under the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU, whereby the five states declared their intent to develop a new scheme for disembarkation and relocation of migrants rescued at sea to ease pressure on Italy and Malta. The proposal, however, was rejected the following month by EU interior ministers in the Justice and Home Affairs Council.

The Covid-19 crisis is giving rise to a similar response from EU member states and the pursuit of national interests rather than common ones. More concretely, the pandemic has revealed the lack of solidarity and unity in the EU response to irregular migration even in an unprecedented situation.

Current European responses to irregular migration thus illustrate that the governance of migration is giving rise to suboptimal policy outcomes. In other words, the tightening of national migration policies has resulted in a ‘race to the bottom’ in asylum standards and rights across Europe. Moreover, the pandemic has exposed the unwillingness of EU leaders to act cohesively in the face of a major crisis. All of this increases the likelihood of the EU developing into an ‘ever looser’ Union, which could ultimately lead to the fragmentation of the European project.

This article was first published on the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) blog on European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) on 23 September 2020.

The post Assessing the impact of Covid-19 on the EU’s response to irregular migration appeared first on Ideas on Europe.