The European Commission has denied any wrongdoing in response to reports that EU funds exacerbated abuse of black migrants in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania – euobserver writes.
“We hear reports on things that is not related to our cooperation with the third countries, we hear reports that are worrying,” Ylva Johansson, the EU’s migration commissioner, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday (12 June).
The statement is in response to a year- long investigation into how people are rounded up and dumped in the desert, primarily because of their skin colour.
As we wrote it earlier the LightHouse Reports findings reveal how EU funds have been used to train personnel and buy equipment used in desert dumps in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania.
Johansson insisted that fundamental rights were an essential component of how the EU spends its funds abroad. “We have not seen any shortcomings in this implementation,” she said. However, when pushed for documents on how fundamental rights are assessed in its migration-related programmes in foreign countries, the European Commission also fails to provide any.
“Migration Diplomacy”
Last year, in response to an MEP’s question, the Commission stated that no rights assessments had been conducted at the project level. It also stated that there were “no regulatory requirements to do so.” Similar responses are received for its programs in Libya, where it hired an outside contractor to draft a report. The European Commission cited the report as evidence that its trust-funded work in Libya adheres to the ‘do no harm’ principle.
Margaritis Schinas, the vice-president of the European Commission in charge of promoting EU values, also came to the EU’s defence. He described the EU’s “migration diplomacy” as key to recently adopted EU-wide asylum and migration overhaul. “Under this commission, we have started to enact a major paradigm shift in the way we handle migration external relations,” he said, speaking alongside Johansson on Wednesday.
The push coincides with the release of the European Commission’s plan for persuading member states of the EU to ratify the ten laws that form the basis of the asylum and migration accord. The new regulations will go into effect in June 2026, and EU member states have until the end of this year to prepare their corresponding implementation strategies.
A little over €3.6 billion in EU funds have been set aside to assist member states in putting the laws into effect, with Eurodac—a system that gathers the biometric details of migrants from the age of six.
Despite the new rules, 15 EU states are now asking for “new ways and solutions” to prevent irregular migration to Europe.
At some 3.8 million, Iran now has more refugees than any other country, followed by Turkey (3.3 million), Colombia (2.9 million) and Germany (2.6 million). And most of the refugees in Germany are from Ukraine, followed by some 700,000 Syrians, 255,000 Afghans, and 146,000 Iraqis.
