As EU co-legislators (Council and European Parliament) are hastily negotiating a political agreement on the New European Pact on Migration and Asylum in December 2023, Refugee Support Aegean (RSA) laid out the major protection risks attached to the reform, in a webinar organised by the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) on 27 November.

Following an overview of the Pact by Hope Barker at BVMN, Eleonora Celoria from Associazione Studi Giuridici Immigrazione spoke of the border procedures applied in Italy. Marta Górczyńska from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights elaborated on Poland and instrumentalisation, while Cavidan Soykan, an independent researcher, spoke of the concept of the Safe Third Countries in the Asylum Procedures Regulation and the EU-Turkey deal.

Our intervention, delivered by Minos Mouzourakis, Legal and Advocacy Officer at RSA, focused on Greece and the screening procedures it has had in force since 2011. As he noted, the Screening Regulation only bears the symbolic appeal of a “reform”, as all aspects of screening already exist in the current asylum rules. On the contrary, “what we have been seeing since 2016 is a very sustained effort at actually lowering the level of protection that the EU offers to those that flee persecution and human rights violations.”

Minos explained that the Screening Regulation will create a perverse effect, where people who express a need for protection should be considered asylum seekers but will not be registered before the completion of the screening process. Given the severe delays in screening and subsequent registration, especially on the Greek mainland, applicants will have no way to prove their status, face risks of detention and lack of access to key services including legal support. 

Finally, Minos discussed the “fiction of non-entry”, which would result in people who are on European soil being trapped in conditions of mass detention and treated as if they have not entered the territory. From a spatial perspective, nothing will change: people will still be on European soil – but in the eyes of EU law, they will be considered to be outside EU territory. This will give Member States the capacity, mainly as a political tool, to keep people alienated and isolated from local communities, and in a state of detention that will clearly violate their fundamental right of liberty.

You can watch the video of the webinar below: