Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-16-Speech-4-014-000"
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"en.20120216.5.4-014-000"2
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"Mr President, as somebody else has already mentioned, this directive is designed to help people, to allow families to be together. Partners who want to be together, parents and children who want to be together, but who currently find themselves living in different countries, for whatever reason. However, it appears that Member States are using the directive to achieve the opposite result, to keep migrants out, to keep out what, in my native country, the Netherlands, are known as no-hoper migrants. That is blatant abuse of a directive intended to respect family life and also, therefore, to encourage us to observe human rights.
Countries are stretching age requirements: are you now allowed to get married at 18 or only when you have reached 21? Countries are imposing income requirements on migrants who want to reunite their families, income requirements which they are not imposing on home nationals. Countries are introducing more and more examination requirements: they are demanding that you must learn the language before you enter the country and are refusing to grant residence permits to those who do not speak the language. I see that happening in the Netherlands. I see that people are trying to get their partners across to the Netherlands, but if they happen to be illiterate, if they have never learned to read or write, then it will not be easy for them to pass the Dutch naturalisation test. What the Dutch Government is saying with this is: yeah right, you can have your right to family reunification, like that is ever going to happen.
I therefore ask the Commission for clarification. Can things be allowed to carry on like this or should the European Commission come up with tighter rules to combat such abusive practices? After all, this is about family reunification and not – as I have heard my French colleague saying – about the absorption capacity of the given country. That is not what this is about. This is about people’s right to be able to be together. Could we, therefore, tighten the rules here to stamp out the kinds of abuse of integration law that we have been talking about, or might that, in practice, be unwise? If we open Pandora’s box, are we not going to get into a lot of trouble? The Netherlands seems to be setting a trend. Even Belgium is now using naturalisation rules in order to refuse permits, and France seems to be considering it.
The question we, this Parliament and the European Commission, are facing, thus, is: should we keep the situation as it is and try to prevent abuse by making court rulings binding throughout Europe? Should we try to use the directive for its intended purpose, namely, family migration, or should we try to modify the directive so that abuse no longer takes place? I must admit, I would like to see improvements, I would like to see the rules tightened, but I think that our policy line should be the following: we keep the directive as it is and we encourage citizens to go to court and win their right there to bring their partner across to Europe."@en1
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