Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-24-Speech-2-353"
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"en.20091124.33.2-353"2
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"Mr President, my thanks to all of the speakers.
That being said, I would also like to respond on the matter of group flights. It must be said that Frontex has already organised group flights and has partly financed those flights. I believe that this must indeed be said. There were such flights in 2008 and in 2009, so they are nothing new. What Frontex is trying to do – and I believe that the director of Frontex is succeeding in this – is to ensure that group repatriations are carried out in decent conditions, where people are respected. The director of Frontex was even telling me recently that he had observed that, in Austria, there was an ombudsman who was specifically monitoring the conditions in which these returns were conducted.
What we also hope to develop is expertise in terms of ensuring that, when these people are deported – after it has been verified that they do not correspond to the definition of persons eligible for international protection or subsidiary protection – they are admitted to their country of origin in decent conditions. It is this point that we are also currently examining at the request of the European Council. Indeed, we have not just thought up the idea of forced return flights without providing any guarantees that people will be respected.
Above all, I would like to remind you – and here I thank Mr Billström and the Swedish Presidency, which has helped us greatly – that, in spring, we began to table texts that are going to help us move towards a Europe of asylum. We have a text on reception conditions, we have reviewed – and Mrs De Sarnez rightly raised this point – the Dublin problem, we have, in fact, raised the issue of adapting the Dublin regulation precisely in order to prevent it from undermining, at times, the interests of vulnerable persons and particularly of children, and we have endorsed the principle of introducing certain derogations from the Dublin regulation.
On 21 October, the Commission adopted two other important texts: one on the Qualification Directive and the other on the Directive on asylum procedures. It is in this new draft Directive on asylum procedures that we are trying to lay down criteria that are genuinely objective, that are the same everywhere. We will need the Support Office to verify specifically that the practices are more or less the same throughout Europe, so that this Europe of asylum can finally come about.
I wish to thank the Swedish Presidency. It has, I believe, done a good job of presenting these various texts to the Council, but they are still a long way away from being adopted. And we have some problems. I am doing everything in my power to try to get this Europe of asylum up and running, with the help of the Swedish Presidency, which has set an example – Mr Billström pointed out, moreover, just how much of an example his country had set in Europe. With regard to this problem, too, the Member States are showing more solidarity when it comes to receiving these refugees and guaranteeing their protection. All of the countries need to starting doing this. We are not there yet, and there are still some countries that do not receive refugees.
That is what I wished to say. I am well aware that I have not responded to every single question. What I can say to you is that, in spite of everything, we in the Commission have done everything we can to enforce respect for European law and, I would say, even more to enforce respect for the values of Europe.
The major difficulty that we are encountering comes from what Mrs Mathieu called mixed flows, where we have immigrants who come for economic or environmental reasons and, at the same time, people who are persecuted and who are entitled to international protection or subsidiary protection. That is the difficulty, and that is what needs to be understood clearly if these problems are to be managed. It is very, very difficult.
What I want to do firstly is respond. I am going to read some elements of the French response – I cannot respond to everything – since you have questioned me on this issue. I shall read the following, from the French response.
‘The interested parties who did not submit an asylum application of their own accord have been questioned as illegal immigrants and placed in administrative detention under the control of the magistrate for custody and release.
Each person was informed in his language of origin of his right to appeal, before the administrative magistrate, the decision to deport him to Afghanistan and his right to seek asylum at the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), or to benefit from a voluntary return measure implemented in association with the International Organisation for Migration.
Of those foreigners, only one lodged neither an asylum application nor an appeal before the administrative magistrate, and two others had their applications examined by OFPRA, where they were heard in the presence of an interpreter. They had the opportunity, during a hearing before the administrative court, with the assistance of a lawyer and in the presence of an interpreter, to explain the risks to which they felt they would be exposed if they returned to their country of origin.
Although OFPRA has granted refugee status or subsidiary protection to several Afghan nationals who have sought protection under similar circumstances, OFPRA considered that, in the case in point, there was no serious or known reason to believe that these persons would be exposed to a genuine risk of suffering persecution or serious threats to their lives or their person if they were deported.’
We also received a response from the UK Government. I have genuinely done what my conscience and my duty demanded; we have made a point of questioning the Member States.
What I would also like to say to you is that, regarding this idea of a safe country, there is Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights case-law that says that the simple fact of coming from a country or a region in which there is unrest is not reason enough to justify absolute protection against deportation or the right to subsidiary protection, except in exceptional cases in which the level of general violence is so high that anyone is in real danger of suffering threats to their life or their person simply as a result of being in the country or the region concerned. Moreover, it is true that these exceptional circumstances were not cited in the case in point."@en1
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