Our team researcher Nuria Hernández has participated in one of the panels of SOS4Democracy Annual Conference organised by TRE Roma TRE University. The Conference named “Democratic backsliding in the era of permanent crises” has taken place in Rome during the 26th, 27th and 28th of June.
Professor Hernández-García intervened in the panel 6 named “minority rights, local government and migration governance” presenting one of her lines of research within the group which is rule of law and fundamental rights. In this sense her presentation focused on analysing the New Pact of Asylum under the lens followed by other authors such as E. Tsourdi on how legislation of asylum can affect the rule of law. Even as unrelated it might seem it is not at all. Rule of law, fundamental rights and democracy form an interconnected and interdependent triad when the erosion of one of them affect the rest.
Even if there is no such thing as the right to asylum there it is a right to request asylum and to protect those that fall into the scope of Geneva Convention definition. The Member States of the EU are forced by international law and European law to do so.
In her presentation, that she intends to transform in a more in-depth analysis, she compares the previous asylum system with the new one that will start applying entirely in 2026.
If the previous system limited the access to asylum by outsourcing of borders and endangered refugee’s rights on the reception system due to the saturation of some Member States and the lack of solidarity among them, the new one is even worse. It assumes that there are no refugees in those flows reaching European soil through the Mediterranean or Eastern land borders and, in this sense, it promotes the return to “safe” third countries – without needing them to be signatories of the Geneva Convention – speeding up the process, expanding the categories in which one asylum request can be indirectly withdrawn without the consent of the asylum seeker, encouraging the detentions at the border and all of that without solving the so called solidarity mechanism to respond to the saturation of the systems of some Member States.
Now, our Member States will be able to choose in which way they want to help the states that are more saturated, being normally those that share their borders with the external borders of the EU. They will choose from a solidarity pool from reallocating, financial contributions or “others of equal value” to be determined… She defends that this New Pact far from solving the problems that arose in the 2015 refugee’s crises aggravates them. The EU has turned towards a more security approach regarding asylum, without guaranteeing the right to request asylum and therefore affecting to that triad – rule of law, human rights and democracy – mentioned before.
