EU: Draconian package
01 March 1993
The most draconian package yet of measures to control immigration were approved in principle by 33 immigration ministers from eastern and western Europe at the second Conference to Prevent Uncontrolled Migration in Budapest on 15 and 16 February 1993. The first, held in Berlin in October 1991, set up a working party (yet another ad hoc group, termed the "Berlin group") with the task of "rapidly developing proposals" for implementing measures decided by the Conference.
The main recommendations of the conference were: to criminalise the smuggling of "illegal migrants" and confiscate the means of transport used; to crack down on the employment of irregular workers; to set up special police and control units with a "joint tactical concept", to pursue those aiding and abetting illegal migration, and illegal workers; to promote the exchange of information about illegal immigrants; to set up effective procedures for discovering illegal entrants, including those coming in as visitors or businessmen; to establish re-admission agreements allowing return of illegal migrants to countries through which they travel for expulsion to their countries of origin; to secure external borders with mobile surveillance forces; to ensure that carrier sanctions are applied comprehensively.
The recommendations are noteworthy for their monolithic approach to illegal migration. There is no recognition, for example, that some "illegals" may be refugees: in most European countries asylum-seekers arriving without documents are condemned as illegal migrants. There is no attempt to divide "smugglers" of "illegal migrants" into profiteers and those individuals or organisations attempting to throw a lifeline to refugees fleeing a war zone so that humanitarian organisations trying to bring civil-war refugees out would be pursued as "smugglers", with in the words of the conference document, "operational tactics geared to the modus operandi of the operators, inter alia by acting along the lines developed for combatting organised crime". There is, indeed, no attempt at discussing the causes of "illegal" migration.
The increasingly military attitude to migration is vividly captured by the recommendations on external borders. The mobile surveillance forces should perform their tasks:
"at sea borders by using patrol boats or appropriate helicopters without, however, dispensing with the use of operational forces on land, whose mission primarily consists of apprehending illegal migrants reported by the airborne surveillance forces"; [and are to be] "integrated into a close network of telephone, radio, telex and other connections", "use highly efficient equipment .. which should be harmonised step by step on the basis of an all- European standard."
The conference is the latest stage in the process of engaging eastern European countries fully in western Europe's immigration policing. Conferences such as this are conducted in parallel with the signing of association agreements giving workers of the eastern European "buffer states" limited opportunities to enter the EC as migrant workers and promising preferential terms of trade and limited aid. The EC has now signed five such association agreements - with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (this needs re-signing with the two separate republics), Romania and, on 8 March, Bulgaria. They are "second round" agreements, giving far fewer rights than those earlier signed with Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The eastern European states' cooperation comes cheaper, and costs them dear: they effectively shoulder the burden of keeping migrants and asylum-seekers away from Europe's eastern borders.
Annex to Notice to members, European Parliament: Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs 4.3.93.