COPENHAGEN: Fifteen EU states have demanded a further tightening of the bloc’s asylum policy, making it easier to transfer undocumented migrants to third countries, including when they are rescued at sea.
The demand, sent in a letter to the European Commission that AFP received on Thursday, comes less than a month before European Parliament elections, in which far-right anti-immigration parties are forecast to make gains.
The letter asks the European Union’s executive arm to “propose new ways and solutions to prevent irregular migration to Europe.”
The group includes Italy and Greece, which receive a substantial number of the people making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to reach the EU — many seeking to escape poverty, war or persecution, according to the International Organization for Migration.
They want the EU to toughen up its recently adopted asylum pact, which introduces tighter controls on those seeking to enter the 27-nation bloc.
That reform includes speedier vetting of people arriving without documents, new border detention centers and faster deportation for rejected asylum applicants.
The 15 proposed in their letter the introduction of “mechanisms... aimed at detecting, intercepting — or in cases of distress, rescuing — migrants on the high seas and bringing them to a predetermined place of safety in a partner country outside the EU, where durable solutions for those migrants could be found.”
They said it should be easier to send asylum seekers to third countries while their requests for protection are assessed.
They cited the example of a controversial deal that Italy has struck with non-EU Albania, under which Rome can send thousands of asylum seekers plucked from Italian waters to holding camps in the Balkan country until their cases are processed.
The concept in EU asylum law of what constitutes “safe third countries” should be reassessed, they continued.

EU law stipulates that people arriving in the bloc without documents can be sent to a third country, where they could have requested asylum — so long as that country is deemed safe and the applicant has a genuine link with it.
That would exclude schemes like the divisive law passed by the UK, which has now left the EU, enabling London to refuse all irregular arrivals the right to request asylum and send them to Rwanda.
Rights groups accuse the African country — ruled with an iron fist by President Paul Kagame since the end of the 1994 genocide that killed around 800,000 people — of cracking down on free speech and political opposition.
The 15 nations said they wanted the EU to make deals with third countries along the main migration routes, citing the example of the arrangement it made with Turkiye in 2016 to take in Syrian refugees from the war in their home country.
The letter was signed by Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania.
It was not signed by Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has resisted EU plans to share out responsibility across the bloc for hosting asylum seekers, or to contribute to the costs of that plan.

LONDON: An Afghan asylum-seeker in the UK has been left wearing an ankle tag months after the pilot scheme he was part of was ended for being unlawful.

The man, identified as MM, revealed he has been made to wear the tag monitoring his location for 20 months and has been given no explanation why, which has left him in a state of “constant stress.”

The GPS tag, part of a Home Office pilot scheme to monitor the locations of 600 migrants, was put on in 2022 after MM spent 60 days in a detention center, having arrived in the UK via a small boat across the English Channel.

The Home Office insisted the tags of all the scheme’s participants were removed when it ended in December after the UK Information Commissioner John Edwards declared it breached data protection law and was “highly intrusive.”

MM, though, was left with his still attached and was provided no explanation from the Home Office as to why.

“Being fitted with this tag has been a constant stress for more than a year and a half. I struggled with sleep because I had to keep the tag charged at all times, including at night, but it would often beep and wake me up,” he said.

“I have had security guards following me like I’m a thief when I go shopping. People in my community do not understand why I have been tagged. They think I am a dangerous criminal. There is physical pain too — it caused a wound that keeps opening up and bleeding.

“It has really affected all parts of my life.”

He continued: “If the law is applied equally, I do not understand why I was fitted with a tag but others were not. Nobody else in the hotel I stayed in had a tag.

“I don’t understand why this injustice has happened. I do not understand why the Home Office needed to monitor everywhere I went and everything I was doing. This was not explained to me at all.”

Niamh Grahame, a solicitor at the Public Law Project, which represented MM, said: “Our client has been subject to a harmful and unnecessary experiment. There is mounting evidence of the harm caused by GPS tagging and incredibly limited evidence of asylum-seekers absconding in significant numbers.

“GPS tagging is an inhumane and disproportionately invasive bail condition. Instead of expanding its use, the Home Office should stop this practice altogether.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “All individuals who were subject to electronic monitoring as part of the Expansion Pilot, and remained in contact with us, had their tags removed before the pilot ended on Dec. 14, 2023.”