Thursday, August 20, 2020
UK Government scores own goal again
If it wasn't bad enough that the Brexiteers effectively won the EU referendum by lying about immigration, they have now taken that agenda into government, proposing unsustainably restrictive policies that will damage our economy. However, their zealous pursuit of Brexit has come back to bite them.
The Guardian reports that EU negotiators have rejected a British request for a migration pact that would allow the government to return asylum seekers to other European countries.
This means that 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:
The government is seeking to replicate the European system outside the bloc, although the Home Office has complained that the EU rules are “rigid, inflexible and abused by migrants and activist lawyers”.
The Guardian has learned that EU member states have ruled out a British plan to recreate the Dublin system outside the EU. Talks on a post-Brexit deal continue this week amid rising tensions between the UK and France following the death of a Sudanese teenager while attempting to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy.
A British plan presented to Brussels 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, excluding airport arrivals.
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”.
The paper puts the UK asylum seeker issue into some context when they point out that 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.
The obsession of government ministers with stopping people seeking asylum in the UK is inhumane and ridiculous. The irony is that in leaving the EU without a deal they have created a problem for themselves. Longstanding mechanisms no longer apply and there is no way they are getting them back.
The Guardian reports that EU negotiators have rejected a British request for a migration pact that would allow the government to return asylum seekers to other European countries.
This means that 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:
The government is seeking to replicate the European system outside the bloc, although the Home Office has complained that the EU rules are “rigid, inflexible and abused by migrants and activist lawyers”.
The Guardian has learned that EU member states have ruled out a British plan to recreate the Dublin system outside the EU. Talks on a post-Brexit deal continue this week amid rising tensions between the UK and France following the death of a Sudanese teenager while attempting to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy.
A British plan presented to Brussels 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, excluding airport arrivals.
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”.
The paper puts the UK asylum seeker issue into some context when they point out that 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.
The obsession of government ministers with stopping people seeking asylum in the UK is inhumane and ridiculous. The irony is that in leaving the EU without a deal they have created a problem for themselves. Longstanding mechanisms no longer apply and there is no way they are getting them back.
