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THE COMMON EUROPEAN ASYLUM SYSTEM ADRIFT
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to the European Court of Justice for their in-
fringement of the Council agreement on which
these schemes were based.
Both relocation agreements have now con-
cluded and the Greek government has officially
confirmed the end of the initiative.
The two-year period Member States were
given to provide international protection for
more than 180,000 people under relocation
and resettlement programmes ended in
September 2017. During this time, the European
Union relocated a mere one out of four of the
people it had made a commitment to receive
and Spain, which relocated or resettled approx-
imately 2,000, fulfilled only slightly more than
12 % of its established quota.
The reasons for this failure are clear. Eligibility
was restricted from the very beginning to na-
tionalities with an average EU asylum recogni-
tion rate of at least 75 %. The discriminatory
nature of this criterion, which runs counter to
the Geneva Convention, meant that thousands
of people who had fled to Italy and Greece from
other countries also immersed in serious civil
conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and
Nigeria were excluded from the programme.
On numerous occasions the European
Commission has taken issue with certain
Member States that have imposed restrictive
conditions on Greek and Italian authorities in-
volved in identification and transfer logistics,
failed to communicate pledges within stipulated
time frames or impeded planned transfers by
creating last-minute bureaucratic obstacles –
practices that have reduced both the pace at
which refugees have been placed and the num-
ber of people the countries in question have
actually accepted.
Many countries have objected to receiving
people with serious health conditions or handi-
caps, victims of violence and, most particularly,
unaccompanied minors. The lack of solidarity
inherent to such practices reveals the faint will
of certain countries to accept refugees within
their borders.
An agreement between the EU and Turkey
clearly born of a desire on the part of the Union
to cut off the sea route being taken by refugees
seeking to leave that country entered into effect
on 20 March 2016. These two powers unilater-
ally decided, counter to the agreements reached
by the Council in June and September, that as
of that date refugees arriving in Greece from
Turkey would be unable to request relocation to
EU countries and thus be left with choice of re-
maining in Greece – a country whose reception
system was already being taxed beyond its func-
tional capacity – or returning to the countries
from which they had originally fled. In May
2017, the European Parliament called for an
end to this exclusionary practice.
The European Commission should have tak-
en a much tougher stance with Member States
failing to meet quota deadlines from the outset
and initiated infraction procedures far more
quickly. EU countries seem to have renounced
the right of asylum and their responsibility to-
wards people fleeing war and persecution.
Xenophobic political parties have not needed to
govern to have their way on this issue; their mes-
sage of fear has given others in power an excuse
for closing their countries’ doors to refugees and
backpedalling on reception commitments.
On 14 March 2018 the Commission issued a
report on the progress made under the European
Agenda on Migration and announced further
key actions to be taken towards a comprehen-
sive deal on migration to be formulated by June
2018 in line with the roadmap for a long-term
EU migration and asylum policy it presented in
December 2017. In this document, the
Commission announced that having relocated