Brussels, my love? Concern around EU migrant pact & EU money troubles

This week, we were joined by Sergio Carrera, senior research fellow with the think tank CEPS, Michele LeVoy, director of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants and Pieter Cleppe, a political commentator and editor of Brussels Report.

Panelists discussed the EU asylum and migration pact that is being negotiated between member states and the European Parliament in the context of the recent shipwrecks in Europe in which dozens of migrants lost their lives.

For Michele LeVoy, the EU pact may be too little, too late and action should have been taken after the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck in which more than 360 people lost their lives.

“Why does it need 300 people? Why isn’t it just one person dying who creates action?” she said.

Fellow panelist Sergio Carrera called the EU pact a “huge disappointment”.

“So the pact itself, on the EU level, unfortunately from our perspective is not really historic. What it actually most likely will do is probably create more suffering. Perhaps that’s not the real intention, but that is what we see will happen most likely,” he said.

Pieter Cleppe called it a “systemic crisis”.

“This time around they will be stopping people from entering the territory of the EU before they have received an asylum request,” said Cleppe “Of course, for that you need to have a very speedy procedure which is questionable,” he said.

The EU pact hopes to share the burden of asylum seekers across the EU, or asks member states to pay up.