By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Aug 9 2004 (IPS)

A proposed European Union (EU) directive imposing tighter restrictions on granting political asylum is causing major concern to refugee councils across the 15 nations that comprised the EU until the bloc’s May 1 expansion to 25 countries.

The president of the Portuguese Refugee Council, María Teresa Tito de Morais, like other representatives of refugees in the region, believes the new regulations under negotiation threaten “the protection of refugees in the EU, violating international obligations assumed by member states.”

As border controls have been dismantled in the wake of the Schengen Agreement, “migratory flows have become a transnational question that can only be effectively handled legally on a European-wide level,” Tito de Morais said in an interview with IPS.

Barriers to free movement within the EU were lifted in 1995, when the Schengen Agreement – signed 10 years previously in that city in Luxembourg by the host country, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands – came into effect. The document includes unified regulations on visas, asylum and border controls.

The Agreement also encompasses other EU members; Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, plus two non-EU countries, Iceland and Norway, while EU members Britain and Ireland have not signed.

“The proposal of an EU community directive setting minimum regulations for the concession and withdrawal of refugee status continues to be a cause of enormous concern” to the EU national councils of refugees, said Tito de Morais.

The Treaty was ratified in 1999 in the southern Finnish city of Tempere, where an EU-wide uniform protection agreement was drawn up.

Prior to this the 1990 Dublin Convention provided a list of criteria for the signatories to use when deciding which country was responsible for examining asylum petitions. The reasoning behind this was to prevent possible beneficiaries from making comparisons to see which was best to deal with their application.

Attempts were also made in Dublin to resolve the problem of cases no country was prepared to take on, something known then as “refugees in orbit.”

New developments came in July 2001, with the approval of an EU directive setting out minimum conditions on the temporary protection of refugees from third countries, linking all signatories of the Agreement except for two dissidents, Denmark and Ireland.

However, the practical implications of the political intentions known as “Dublin II” were only seen in 2003 after the document was signed in the Irish capital. Under this agreement asylum seekers can be returned to the first state via which they entered the Schengen zone, in most cases probably a frontier state.

Tito de Morais said the EU must not focus on this question from a purely Eurocentric perspective, adding that she was in total agreement with the concerns aired by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Ruud Lubbers, who pointed out in May that asylum-seekers come from conflict-ridden countries and regions.

Lubbers went on to say that the EU must have a true common European outlook in order to tackle irregular migratory flows.

He said he feared that the directive would be reduced to a catalogue of options, including alternatives far from international standards on the protection of refugees and human rights and the principles established more than 50 years ago.

According to the latest UNHCR data, up until the first six months of 2003 approximately 75 percent of the 20 million refugees and asylum-seekers in the world were in developing countries.

Statistics show that in the first half of last year, the number of people coming to the EU in search of asylum had fallen markedly on previous years, while the total number of asylum-seekers is far lower than was seen in the early 1990s.

Applications for asylum in Western Europe peaked in 1992, at nearly 700,000. But the EU was not prepared for such a large inflow of refugees and its existing capacity was quickly overwhelmed. The situation was further compounded by member nations showing unwillingness to assign resources proportional to the magnitude of the problem.

Then Germany, in the heart of the European bloc, received 350,000 Bosnians in the early 1990s, and called for some kind of an agreement to help spread the burden.

In 1995, the 15 EU members approved a non-binding resolution on sharing refugees in terms of the admission and temporary residence of displaced persons.

The mass exodus of refugees from the former Yugoslavian republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s and from the Serbian province of Kosovo at the end of the decade meant that spreading the load was an important question in the EU at the time, and it is still a controversial issue.

However, the proportion of asylum requests received by Germany fell from 63 percent of all applications in Western Europe at the beginning of the last decade to 23 percent in 1999.

The harmonisation of asylum policies in the EU is one of the great challenges faced by the member states’ councils for refugees.

“(We want) the asylum systems to be more fair, efficient and predictable, not only to benefit the governments but also refugees and asylum seekers,” stressed Tito de Morais.

“I fully agree with UNHCR when they say in many cases, however, that the criteria of the lowest common denominator has prevailed, and consequently the protection of refugees has worsened instead of improving,” she added.

The sort of concerns voiced by Lubbers and Tito de Morais are not the only issues threatening refugees here. There has also been a systematic campaign by media outlets controlled by xenophobic European right-wingers who want governments to stop accepting more asylum-seekers.

One frequently cited example of this comes from the British daily ‘The Dover Express,’ which described immigrants and asylum-seekers as “human sewage” in October 1998.

The conservative parties in power in most EU nations should use practical economic arguments to silence the clamour of the far right, which forms part of the government coalitions in some cases, like Austria, Italy and Portugal.

Those who call for pragmatism point out that with current mortality and birth rates in the EU, the bloc will need an average of 1.4 million immigrants per year between 1995 and 2050 to maintain the proportion of active to passive population.

Meanwhile, net immigration toward the bloc averaged 857,000 people per year from 1990 to 1998.

Tito de Morais warned that, while the Schengen and Dublin agreements are binding for states which have ratified them, “other harmonisation activities have taken place outside a binding framework, in an intergovernmental process which is far from transparent.”

One cause for concern about the new directive “is that this leaves enforcement up to the discretion of the member states.”

“The distance between a country’s interest in controlling its borders and reducing abuse of asylum at one extreme, and the individual rights of refugees at the other, must be reduced to a minimum,” she explained.

To do this, she added, “We would have to begin by defining the fundamental principles and guarantees which should characterise asylum procedures,” rather than moving towards a system based on “the interpretation of terms like ‘persecution,’ ‘agents of persecution,’ internal alternative of flight or membership of a specific social group.”

Since the early 1990s, EU leaders at the highest levels have repeatedly stated their intention of establishing a common asylum and immigration policy. However, as Tito de Morais said, “Despite this assertion in principle, the goal has been marked by the difficulty in making it concrete.”

Excerpt: