The EU has rejected a British request for a migration pact that would allow the government to return asylum seekers to other European countries. European officials dismissed the proposal put forward by Boris Johnson’s chief negotiator as “one-sided” and said the UK would instead have to reach separate agreements with member states.
“The assessment is that this is very much picking and choosing aspects of the current EU system,” a European diplomat told the Guardian.
Talks on a post-Brexit deal continue this week amid rising tensions between the UK and France following the death of a 16-year-old boy from Sudan who disappeared at sea and was found dead on a French beach after attempting to cross the English Channel in a small boat. It will be 5 years in September since the drowned body of Syrian refugee toddler Alan Kurdi was found on a beach in Turkey which sparked the UK and European governments to open their doors to more refugees.
Labour MP Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow home secretary, said the government’s response to the rise in crossings had been “lacking in compassion and competence”.
He urged ministers to
“step up work with international partners to find a humanitarian solution to this crisis, which is costing lives”.
The draft plan presented to Brussels this week would allow the UK to return “all third-country nationals and stateless persons” who enter its territory without the right paperwork to the EU country they had travelled through to reach British shores. The British government would have a reciprocal obligation to take in undocumented migrants arriving in the EU via the UK.
The proposal is an attempt to replicate the European system outside the bloc, as when the Brexit transition period expires on 31 December, the government will lose the right to transfer refugees and migrants to the EU country in which they arrived, a cornerstone of the European asylum system known as the Dublin regulation.
At a time when southern Europe has nearly 10 times more refugees and migrants arriving by sea, the UK plan has been described in Brussels as “very unbalanced” and “not good enough”.
An EU official said:
“The proposal, from the EU perspective, isn’t very operational and doesn’t bring a lot of added value.”
More than 4,100 people have crossed the Channel in small boats so far this year, compared with 39,283 who traversed the Mediterranean to Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta. At the height of the migration crisis in 2015, more than a million people arrived on the continent’s southern shores.
Home Office figures show the UK returns few asylum seekers to other EU countries. In 2018 it transferred 209 people under the Dublin regulation, while accepting 1,215 migrants from the rest of Europe.