By  Zeno Leoni and  Federica Santoro.

BRI is the framework of China’s trans-continental, multi-dimensional, and pluri-billionaire grand strategy. As explained in the reportA Study of ICT Connectivity for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Enhancing the Collaboration in China-Central Asia Corridor, published by the United Nations’ agency ESCAP, this project’s aims are: “(1) To enhance policy coordination; (2) To improve infrastructure connectivity; (3) To reinforce trade and investment cooperation; (4) To move forward with financial integration; and (5) To support people-to-people collaboration”.

To achieve these objectives, three sets of BRI tools stand out among Others:

• firstly, joined by 97 states, the AIIB represents the BRI’s financial backbone. Challenging the Western, short-termed and consumerist development model, the AIIB’s mission is that of sponsoring infrastructures growth.;

• secondly, Chinese cosmopolitanism tianxia – literally, “all under Heaven” – is the BRI’s ideological cover. This construct reflects a purpose for a “community of shared destiny for mankind”. Indeed, it aims at building a world order where nations live in a trade- and exchange-induced “harmony”. Contrarily to US liberal universalism, tianxiamakes no demands on the domestic political system of BRI’s partners;

• thirdly, a return to 19^thcentury-styled geopolitical revisionism such as territorialism in the South China Sea, increasing military spending and the quest for a blue-water navy to patrol the Indian Ocean it will potentially provide the iron fist to the BRI.

Beijing’s image of this order is Sino-centric. This leads to some critical questions: is BRI synonym with Chinese empire? Although “empire” has both positive and negative connotations, in its neutral meaning it is a conflation of economic with (geo-)political dynamics. Therefore, is the BRI merely a commercial plan?.

According to Colin Flint and Cuiping Zhu, the BRI has to be seen through the lenses of a “‘single logic’ of competition in the capitalist world-economy”, where “firms and states are connected as the former seeks to maximize profits while states (i) seek to ‘capture’ that economic activity within their borders, (ii) make global connections that maximize the benefits of global economic flows for their ‘domestic’ economy, and (iii) intertwine economic agendas with geopolitical goals”.

This picture describes well Beijing’s “Go West” strategy. The driver of this outward looking approach is blamed by some upon China’s overaccumulation crisis begun in the early 2000’s. As explained by Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva, “economic decentralisation created a fragmented national economy, in which local governments engaged in anarchic competition to attract foreign direct investment. This nurtured overinvestment and uncoordinated construction of redundant production capacity and infrastructure”. This was exacerbated by the Great Recession and the decline in export towards the West.

Within such a framework, China considers Central Asia and Eurasia as strategic regions. Indeed, these territories lie at the crossroad of important trade routes but also contain abundant reserves of natural resources such as oil, gas, minerals and metals. 

Indeed, in the last six years China’s BRI has made an impressing impact in the Eurasian continent, as it transpires from the report Chinese Grand Strategy in the Eurasian Heartland, published by SKOLKOVO – Institute for Emerging Market Studies (IEMS).

Two of the six BRI’s economic corridors pass through the region, connecting China to the European Union and the Middle East. Eurasian Heartland’s trade with China has been growing at double-digit rates over a number of years.  It has reached $140bn in 2018, spreading across over 160 projects mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan, the largest economies in the region. Indeed, these two countries have received 65% of all Chinese money directed to Central Asia.

Market dynamics and global trends define Sino-Russia relations. Both traditionally Western-oriented economically, in times of crisis like nowadays they see each other as the centre of an alternative international order. That explains why China invested $70bn dollars in the Power of Siberia pipeline construction project, and in the intensification of Sino-Russian economic cooperation in Arctic LNG projects. China, like Russia, is interested in exploring the Northern Sea Route since Western-imposed sanction hit Moscow Russia. Also the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is seen essential for China in Central Asia to provide Chinese company with access to regional market.

Kazakhstan – after Russia – is the largest country in the region, very rich in those mineral resources and fertile lands that China needs.  Xi Jinping choose its capital, Nur-Sultan (former Astana), to launch the BRI in 2013. Since then, the Belt and Road Initiative has become one of the most important enablers of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). It transformed the country in a regional infrastructure hub and led to the creation of a Special Economic Zone around the Khorgos Dry port, a key logistic target. China also considers Kazakhstan an important supplier of oil and gas: notably, 76% of Chinese FDI in the country have been directed to the energy sector. 

But other Central Asian countries are increasingly involved in the BRI. The South Caucasian resource-rich Azerbaijan represents one of the very few alternatives for Europe to the Russian gas and it is set to work with China on energy and transit to Europe. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNCP) is helping to explore fields in Turkmenistan, for years China’s main gas supplier in the region. The country is not only a source of natural gas but a potential test bed for Huawei telecom equipments. State Owned and Private Chinese Telecom companies are implementing a broad range of projects in the Tech Sector, including a smart city test in Baku and a data centre in Kazakhstan, providing loans to help countries to develop new capacity using Chinese Huawei equipments.

One of the most ambitious plan for the next 3-5 years is the construction of a trans-Eurasian data super interconnector (TASIM) that should develop through at least three Central Asian countries: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan.

Another BRI receiver is strategically located between Russia and the European Union and has very high transit potential for China’s infrastructure. In Belarus, the upgrading of highways has been financed by Chinese Exim Bank loans. Similarly, in Uzbekistan China proposes to build a new rail link from Xinjiang. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan the BRI has provoked concerns for being a controversial plan. A win-win situation at first sight that would instead create benefits for Chinese export only, opening an additional route and leading to a socio-economic divide beetween the North and the South of the country.

Belt and Road Initiative is the vastest geopolitical and investment project in human history, although it has never been explicitly presented as such. Indeed, it still remains an ambiguous undertaking. Central Asia and Caucasus countries provide a natural link to Europe and some Islamic states. Enhancing cooperation with the Islamic world, is key for China to maintain security and stability in a region where the BRI’s effects are diverse and complex.

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In the picture Zeno Leoni.

Zeno Leoni, PhD, Teaching Fellow in ‘Challenges to the International Order’, Defence Studies Department, Affiliate Lau China Institute  – King’s College London.

Federica Santoro, Dr, Analyst of EU-China Relations and Chinese Strategic Policy. Master Degree in Global Strategy and Security at the Italian Defense Higher Studies Institute of Rome. 

Link:

Link to the original publication in Vision & Global Trends:

https://www.vision-gt.eu/news/economics/eurasian-countries-within-belt-and-road-initiative-what-game-is-being-played/

By Dr. Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian, Director of Social Inclusion at the Organization of American States.

According to UNICEF, there are about 200 million afrodescedants in the Americas, an estimated 30% of the population. Of this, close to 50% includes children, and adolescents younger than 18 years old. If the 200 million people of African descent in the region were a country, they would be 53 times the size of Panama, 19 times the size of the Dominican Republic, 10 times the size of Chile. Who can deny they are an integral component of what we are as a region? 

The fact is, however, that regardless of the last few decades of economic growth, estimates indicate that afrodescedants continue to exhibit the highest levels of poverty, social exclusion, and discrimination. As a result of racism and discrimination, 90% of this population in the countries of the region live in poverty and extreme poverty with 70 to 80% earning less than 2 dollars a day. Often, they do not have universal access to health, education, housing or clean water. They also face more obstacles in terms of getting a job, and keeping it, and earn salaries that are generally less than the average. 

Afrodescedants also face challenges in the exercise of their political rights. Although they are included as voters, they generally have limited possibilities to compete for public office due to the fact that, among other things, they are overwhelmingly part of the socio-economic groups with the lowest earning capacity.

In 2013, year for which the most up-to-date comparative data exists, their representation in political decision-making posts was far from ideal. In Brazil, for example, only 8.60% of the total legislators were afrodescedants in a country where this group represents 50.9% of the population. In Colombia, where they represent 10.5% of the population, their congressional representation only reached 4.60%. In Costa Rica, with 7.8% of afrodescedants, in 2013, there was not even one legislator of African descent. In Venezuela, with 53.4% of afrodescedants, only 2.40% of the National Assembly were of this origin.

Whereas it is important to consider affirmative action policies that level the playing field for afrodescedants to compete, it is equally important to address the structural problems that cause their social exclusion. After all, which person who has to provide for his or her basic needs regarding food, housing or health can effectively enter the political arena and compete for public office? 

To shed light on these challenges, the Member states of the Organization of American States declared, last March 25, 2018, the “Inter-American Week for People of African Descent in the Americas”. The objective is to foster greater awareness and respect for the diversity of the heritage and culture of people of African descent and their contribution to the development of societies.

This celebration also seeks to recognize the important contributions of persons of African descent to the politics, economies, cultures, and societies of the region. The road map has been developed: the OAS Plan of Action for the Decade for People of African Descent in the Americas (2016–2025), which prioritizes lines of action to promote the Recognition, Justice, and Development of Afrodescedants in the region with the ultimate objective of closing the gaps in the enjoyment of all their human rights.

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(Opinions are personal. They do not represent the views of the OAS).

ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger and the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stef Blok.

Netherlands is a key strategic partner for the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), supporting ICMP’s Headquarters in The Hague and supporting its core functions and country programs around the world, ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger said.  

Ms Bomberger was speaking after a meeting in The Hague with Foreign Minister Stef Blok. She highlighted the fact that “the Netherlands was one of the key players behind the signing – with the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden – of the ICMP Agreement in December 2014,” and noted that the Agreement, which establishes ICMP as the only international organization in the world that exclusively addresses the issue of missing and disappeared persons, “reflects the emerging international consensus about the nature and scale of the global missing persons issue and the urgent need to tackle this issue in a coherent and effective way.”   

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) facilitated ICMP’s move to Headquarters in The Hague in 2015 and also ICMP’s laboratory transition to The Hague, which was completed at the end of 2017. 

Since this relocation, ICMP has developed its existing partnership with the Netherlands Forensic Institute, and forged ties with Rotterdam Univeristy and Leiden University, including  through HumanityX , an initiative that serves as the innovation engine of The Hague Humanity Hub. ICMP has been able to develop the operational capacity of its laboratory and begin applying next generation DNA technologies that will advance the science of human identification, which is critical to providing irrefutable evidence of a person’s identity.   

From 2015 to 2018, the MFA and the City of The Hague granted ICMP more than 2.5 Million EUR, enabling it to implement, through its Headquarters, core programs that are essential to carry out its global work.  The Dutch authorities indicated at the end of last year that they will provide funding of 1.5 million EUR over three years beginning in 2019 so that ICMP can maintain core Headquarters capacities that are needed in order to carry out its work.  

Dutch support has helped ICMP, among other things, to set in place systems in Iraq that will assist in identifying those missing from ISIS crimes, launch a new program to gather information about missing persons from Syrians who have sought refuge in countries neighboring Syria, support legislative and institutional processes in Colombia that will ensure that the missing persons framework established under the 2016 peace agreement can operate successfully, test DNA samples from victims of enforced disappearance from the 1964-85 military dictatorship in Brazil, improve the capacity and coordination of countries in the Mediterranean, including Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus, to account for missing migrants, and strengthen stakeholder networks among civil society, government officials, and international organizations engaged in the missing persons issue.  

The Netherlands was one of ICMP’s the earliest supporters after it was established in 1996, and has been a major and long-standing donor to ICMP’s Western Balkans Program. It has also supported ICMP’s development in response to the global challenge of missing persons.

The issue affects countries throughout the world and has multiple causes. ICMP’s mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, irregular migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so.  It is the only international organization tasked exclusively to work on the issue of missing persons. 

Ladislav Hamran, President of Eurojust.

The Hague, 5 July 2019

The level of digitalisation in our societies is increasing every day and so, unfortunately, is cybercrime. This situation requires law enforcement and prosecution practitioners to constantly adapt their expertise, tools and practices to effectively and efficiently respond to this change.

Today, Europol and Eurojust published the third joint report identifying and categorising the current developments and common challenges in combating cybercrime, which fall into five different areas:

1. Loss of data: electronic data is the key to successful investigations in all the cybercrime areas, but the possibilities to obtain such data have been significantly limited.
2. Loss of location: recent trends have led to a situation in which law enforcement may no longer establish the physical location of the perpetrator, the criminal infrastructure or electronic evidence.
3. Challenges associated with national legal frameworks: the differences in domestic legal frameworks in EU Member States often prove to be serious impediments to international cybercrime investigations.
4. Obstacles to international cooperation: in an international context, no common legal framework exists for the expedited sharing of evidence (as does exist for the preservation of evidence). There is also a clear need for a better mechanism for cross-border communication and the swift exchange of information.
5. Challenges of public-private partnerships: cooperation with the private sector is vital for combating cybercrime, yet no standardised rules of engagement are in place, and investigations can thus be hampered.

Borderless crime calls for international measures

All these challenges are of special relevance to combat cybercrime, but affect other crime areas as well.

The very nature of cyberspace means that cybercrime is borderless. Consequently, international measures are required to address the current challenges. S

ignificant progress has been made since the publication of the last report in 2017. Key components of this progress include enhanced cooperation between all parties involved and providing platforms and networks dedicated to sharing knowledge and best practice, such as the European Judicial Cybercrime Network (EJCN) and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT).

By Dr. Alfred Kellermann.

To understand issues of migration and asylum in the EU the following key studies, documents, terms and facts should be known.

1. European Refugee crisis

The European migrant crisis or refugee crisis is a term given to a period beginning in 2015 characterized by rising numbers of people arriving to the European Union (EU) from across the Mediterranean Sea or overland through South-East Europe. 

Immigrants from outside Europe include asylum seekers and economic migrants. 

The term “immigrant” is used by the European Commission to describe a person from a non-EU country establishing his or her usual residence in the territory of an EU country for a period that is, or is expected to be, at least twelve months.

Most of the immigrants came from Muslim-majority countries in regions South and East of Europe, including the Greater Middle East and Africa. The number of deaths at sea, rose to record levels in April 2015, when five boats carrying almost 2,000 migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea.  Now it is lower!

The situation of refugees has become more desperate in recent years. Between 2014 and 2016 over 1 million people sought asylum in the European Union. In 2017, 655.000 persons applied for asylum in the EU for the first time. In 2018, 581.000 did so. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum.statistics

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees the top three nationalities of entrants of the over one million Mediterranean See arrivals between January 2015 and March 2016 were Syrian (46,7%), Afghan (20,9%) and Iraqi (9,4%) .

Refugee crises in several Asian and African countries increased the total number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide at the end of 2014 to almost 60 million, the highest level since World War II.

1. European Agenda on Migration

The latest response from the EU to the situation is the European Agenda on Migration, which aims to strengthen the common migration and asylum policy by implementing various measures helping refugees in difficulty during their travel to Europe locating them in the EU, supporting Member States available to receive refugees and coordinating national operations.

EU operations in 2016 were funded to approximately € 176 million. The EU was also relocating refugees from Italy and Greece to other EU Member States and provided further financial support to countries willing to take in refugees from camps in Syria and those that had set up first–aid centers for refugees on their territory. 

The European Parliament has expressed its concern about EU financial support in the field of asylum and has asked the Commission to evaluate the real needs until 2020.The European Parliament by its policy departments provided many supporting analyses for the respective Parliament committees.  EU external cooperation in migration and asylum has increased considerably in terms of instruments of cooperation with third partner countries and of funds committed. With the current refugee crisis, it is set to increase even further. EU funding regarding the objectives of migration policy lacks evidence of efficiency through lack of coordination of external coordination. 

Migration is one of the great challenges of the globalized world.

Refugees will always move across borders to seek safety for themselves and their families in the face of war, persecution and conflict. People who face poverty in their home country will always move in search of a better life for themselves and their families. In the European Union, the Member States seek to support those who work to protect the legal rights of migrants and refugees, and to ease the challenges of integration.

They support the development of realistic policy solutions to the human challenges involved. In line with the focus on policy and institutional responses, the important humanitarian relief response of NGOs, funding is needed such as the operation of search and rescue vessels in the Mediterranean. 

1. Is there a difference between a migrant and a refugee?

A migrant is a person who leaves home to seek a new life in another region or country. This includes all those who move across borders, including those doing so with government permission, i.e., with a visa or a work permit, as well as those doing so without it, i.e., irregular or undocumented migrants.

The member states of the European Union agree that EU citizens and their families have freedom of movementwithin the EU and the European Economic Area—these citizens are privileged migrants because they do not require individual permission from officials as other migrants do.

These citizens enjoy the rights of the Schengen  Agreement of 14 June 1985, in which 26 European countries (22 of the EU Member States and four EFTA states) joined together to form an area where border checks on internal Schengen borders (between member states) are abolished and instead checks are restricted to external Schengen borders. Countries may reinstate internal border controls for a maximum of two months for public policy or national security reasons. 

A refugee is someone fleeing war, persecution, or natural disaster. Refugee status is defined in international law, which requires states to protect refugees and not send anyone to a place where they risk being persecuted or seriously harmed. States hold primary responsibility for the protection of refugees. The UN counted 21.3 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2015.

“Asylum” refers to the legal permission to stay somewhere as a refugee, which brings rights and benefits. Not every asylum seeker will ultimately be recognized as a refugee, but every refugee is initially an asylum seeker.

Article 26 of the “Schengen Convention” says that careers which transportpeople into Schengen area who are refused entry into the Schengen area, be responsible for the return of the refused people and pay penalties.

1. European Union’s asylum policy and the Dublin regulation?

The Dublin Regulation (Regulation No.604/2013): sometimes the Dublin III Regulation; previously the Dublin II Regulation and Dublin Convention) is a European Union (EU) law that determines which EU Member State is responsible for the examination of the application, submitted by persons seeking international protection under the Geneva Convention.

It is the cornerstone of the Dublin System, which consists of the Dublin Regulation and the EURODAC Regulation (Regulation No 603/2013), which establishes a Europe wide fingerprinting database for unauthorized entrants to the EU.  

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) sets out the Criteria governing the distribution, as between Member States, of responsibilities in asylum cases under Regulation No. 343/2003. Under that regulation only one Member State is in principle , responsible for dealing with an asylum application submitted within the EU. In this regulation are established the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for  examining an asylum application lodged in one of the Member States by a third country national.  

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is a set of EU laws. They are intended to ensure that all EU member states protect the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. The CEAS sets out minimum standards and procedures for processing and deciding asylum applications, and for the treatment of both asylum seekers and those who are recognized as refugees. 

Implementation of CEAS varies throughout the European Union. A number of EU states still do not operate fair, effective systems of asylum decision-making and support. This leads to a patchwork of 28 asylum systems producing uneven results. Asylum seekers have no legal duty to claim asylum in the first EU state they reach, and many move on, seeking to join relatives or friends for support, or to reach a country with a functioning asylum system.

However, the “Dublin” regulation stipulates that EU Member States can choose to return asylum seekers to their country of first entry to process their asylum claim, so long as that country has an effective asylum system. The “Dublin Regulation” determines the EU Member State responsible to examine an asylum-application to prevent asylum applicants  in the EU from “” asylum shopping”, where applicants send their application for asylum to numerous EU Member States to get the best deal instead.

EU countries in the north, the desired destination of many refugees, have sought to use this Dublin system to their advantage, at the expense of the south, where most refugees first arrive. Yet these efforts have been obstructed by failures of asylum systems in the south. Domestic and European courts have ruled against asylum seekers being returned to Greece, notably in a landmark case in 2011 (C-411/10 N.S and C-493/10 M.E).

The Advocate General of the ECJ concluded that the transferring Member State must before it transfers an asylum seeker, determine whether that asylum seeker will be exposed in the Member State which is primarily responsible, to a serious risk that the rights guaranteed under the Charter of Fundamental Rights will not be violated. Transfer to Greece, which country is overloaded with asylum applications, risks that the treatment of asylum requests is not well done .

To address the uneven application of CEAS and the problems of the Dublin system, a reform of the CEAS was proposed in 2016. Among the proposed reforms is one that risks endangering the right to asylum in the EU, with an obligation to verify first if asylum seekers could find protection outside the EU. Some EU countries have already voiced opposition to some of the reforms, notably the obligation to take refugees from other EU countries. They started cases at the CJEU against the re-distribution and at the same time the EU Commission instigated cases  against Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic for refusing to abide by the redistribution quota.

The European Parliamentin a study in 2015 examined the reasons why the Dublin system of allocation of responsibility for asylum seekers does not work effectively. The study gave recommendations for resolving current practical, legal and policy problems, to create a burden sharing system through several mechanisms. The European Parliament and the Council proposed a “reference key”, based on an Member State’s GDP and population size to determine its absorption capacity. 

Conclusion
Common asylum and migration policies are not yet realized because of the different attitudes of the EU Member States in respect of migration policies. Therefore, is our final question: Is the migration challenge not the ultimate threat to European Unity and Solidarity?

• How are EU Member States regulating/managing/supporting migration?

The EU Member States have worked on global migration issues for many years. This has included 1) supporting efforts to improve the treatment of labor migrants in Central Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and the Gulf; 2) advocating a better, common asylum policy in Europe; 3) challenging conditions of detention for migrants in many countries; and 4) defending migrant communities against a wide array of xenophobic attacks in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. 

Examples of support to migration by States and Ngo’s.

In Italy, organizations that work to reform Italy’s asylum system are supported. Medici per i Diritti Umani advocates for better conditions in Italy’s asylum reception centers; Italy promotes housing refugees and asylum seekers in private accommodation as an alternative to state facilities; they work to ensure that international, European, and national laws are honored during asylum procedures, that reception conditions are dignified, and that no one is deprived of their liberty without judicial oversight and procedural safeguards. The Italian Civil Liberties Coalition and its platform Open Migration provides data, fact checking, and stories to inform the migration debate.

In Greece, organizations like the Greek Council for Refugees, which monitors rights violations at border areas, assists in reception facilities, and in detention centers; the Hellenic League of Human Rights, which provides asylum seekers with reliable information about their rights and obligations; and the Greek Forum of Refugees, a refugee- and migrant-led organization that seeks to support migrants’ integration in the country. Solidarity Now,set up in 2013 by the Open Society Foundations—and today a grantee—provides housing, basic medical care, and other relief services to newcomers and Greeks.

In Spain, NGOs are supported which provide legal aid to refugees and seek to improve the national asylum system, such as the as Spanish Commission for Refugees and Coordinadora de Barrios.

In Western Europe, this work extends from the United Kingdom to Finland. The Migrants’ Rights Network reports and challenges the rise in racism and xenophobia in Britain, Migrant Voice amplifies migrants’ perspectives through its newspaper, the Raul Wallenberg Institute in Swedenbuilds the capacity of grassroots groups to advocate for themselves, and Mediendienst-Integration in Germany serves as a reliable source of information and data for media reporting on migration.

In Britain, NGO’s have worked with the UK government on the development of a community sponsorship scheme, the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, based on a successful Canadian model for supporting the integration of newly arrived refugee families In Central and Eastern Europe. NGO’s support local organizations which work to ensure newcomers are treated with dignity and assist with their integration into the society. Menedék organizes training courses for professionals including social workers, teachers, and police officers working in immigration detention centers in Hungary, and the Association for Migration and Integration in the Czech Republic is working on ensuring that the rights of EU nationals working in the country are protected.

• How has the European Union responded to the refugee crisis?

On 20 March 2016 an agreement between the European Union and Turkey, aiming to discourage migrants from making the dangerous sea journey from Turkey to Greece, came into effect.

The deal outlines that migrants arriving in Greece will be sent back to Turkey if they do not apply for asylum or their claim is rejected. To assist in the implementation of this deal the EU would send around 2.300 experts, including security and migration officials and translators to Greece. After 20 March 2016 any irregular immigrant from Syria who is returned to Turkey, will be replaced by a Syrian resettled from Turkey to the EU.

The talks were aiming at accession of Turkey to EU and Turkey will receive from the EU €3,3 billion aid for the assistance.  In the March deal of 2016, the EU announced that Turkey would try to stop people from moving onward into Europe; in return, Turkey was promised financial assistance, visa-free travel to the EU for Turkish citizens, and faster negotiations for EU accession. But the EU-Turkey deal failed to close the border, and thousands of migrants continued to travel irregularly using smugglers. Since the deal, only 750 asylum seekers have been sent back from Greece to Turkey, because Greek officials and courts consider Turkey to be an unsafe country

There has been a Decision from the European Court of Justice of 28 February 2017, that the Court has no competence to judge the legality of the March 2016 EU -Turkey deal on migrants and refugees as “neither the European Council nor any other institution of the EU decided to conclude an agreement with the Turkish Government on the subject of the migration crisis”.

The General Court of the ECJ declared that it lacks jurisdiction to hear and determine the actions brought by three asylum seekers  against the EU-Turkey statement which seeks to resolve the migration crisis.In other words Article 263 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, regarding the powers of the court, is not applicable in this case. (The orders issued by the court.NF (T-192/16, NG (T-193/16, NM (T-257/16 And the EU –Turkey statement 18 March 2016). 

In 2015, high numbers of migrants, many of them Syrians fleeing conflict, continued to move. Some European states, led by Germany, recognized that their strategy of seeking to block refugees moving across borders was unrealistic and harmful. Countries worked together to allow migrants to move onwards to the places they wished to reach.

This allowed reception countries to focus their resources on supporting asylum seekers and considering claims. By early 2016, support for this policy began to decrease, with increased hostility towards migrants entering the political discourse. Certain countries along the migrant route began to close their borders. 

Deals to distribute asylum seekers between EU Member states. 

The situation further deteriorated when the EU’s decision to transfer 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other European member states was met with widespread resistance. In the end, a small percentage of the needed transfers actually took place. In response to the failure to adequately process asylum claims, the EU set up “hotspots” in Greece and Italy. Hotspots identify, register, and fingerprint incoming migrants, and redirect them either towards asylum or return procedures.

The Turkey deal is one example of a controversial practice, in which the EU links development aid or economic incentives to commitments by states to stem and manage the movements of people from their territory. Similar deals are being approved with a number of third countries including Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and Nigeria. 

In June 2016, the European Commission proposed a new “New Migration Partnership Framework” with third countries in the Middle East and Africa, to better manage migration. The full range of EU policies will be brought to bear: 

• Focused engagement and enhanced support
• Breaking the business model of people smugglers and creating legal routes
• Working together EU and Member States financial allocation.
•  How have the United Nations responded to the Refugee Crisis?

On 19 September 2016 the Members of the United Nations unanimously adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The Declaration recognized the need for more cooperation between nations to manage migration  effectively.

On 19 December 2018  these documents were approved by 152 nations as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (CCM), that describes itself as covering all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner. The compact was formally endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly on 19 December 2018. As the Compact is not an International treaty, it will not be binding under international law. According to the Opinion of the New Zealand Government”, the Compact will be non-binding , but will not be legally irrelevant , and “courts may be willing ..to refer to the Compact and take the Compact into account as an aid in interpreting immigration legislation.” 

There was a heated debate in the EU and in some of its Member States about the Global Compact : 20 of 28 EU Member States signed it. Leaked legal opinion of the Council’s Legal Service was used to argument that these lawyers said that the Compact was legally binding.  The opinion merely states that the Compact can influence the content of EU legislation. See https://www.janiceatkinson.co.uk/wp-conent/uploads/’2019/03/UN-GCM-EU-LAW-explanation-why-the-leaked-Legal-Service-Opinion-is-arisk.pdf 
However the Compact will not be legally binding.

The draft agreement recognizes the principles of national sovereignty:

“The Global Compact reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law. Within their sovereign jurisdiction, States may distinguish  between regular and irregular migration status, including as they determine their legislative and policy measures for the implementation of the Global Compact, taking into account different national realities, policies, priorities and requirements for entry, residence and work , in accordance with international law.”

Calling the agreement a “historic moment”, the General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak emphasized “it does not encourage migration, nor does it aim to stop it. It is not legally binding. It fully respects the sovereignty of States.      

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This paper has been presented by the author at the World Congress on Humanities and Social Sciences in Paris May 16 -17, 2019