Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-05-Speech-3-347"
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"en.20060705.22.3-347"2
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".
Mr President
EU-Africa Ministerial Conference on Migration and Development, a conference initiated by Morocco, France and Spain, following the tragic events of Ceuta and Melilla. There is one tragedy after another. According to some reports, 3 000 people are thought to have died over the last few months trying to reach the Canary Islands. Yet, the debates are focused not on the duty to protect people, but, once again, on the control, the closing, and even the militarisation, of borders. Yet, as all the reports attest, the majority of population movements are headed for the countries of the South, and not for those of the North, and the number of asylum claims in Europe has halved over the last 15 years.
The Union and its Member States have an increasing influence on development aid. Only last week, a Senegalese newspaper ran the headline: ‘Europe is closing our borders’. That strategy puts the lives of twice as many people at risk – those whose only chance of survival is to leave their country, and those who are forced to take ever greater risks in order to enter Europe. Yet, freedom of movement, and more specifically the freedom to leave one’s country, is enshrined in the international standards.
The absurdity of this policy is plain to see when we know that the income that migrant workers send back to their countries of origin is twice the amount of official development aid. Rather than guaranteeing respect for the fundamental rights of migrants and asylum seekers, namely the right of access to asylum procedures, the principle of non-refoulement or the right to a private and family life, Europe is multiplying the strategies aimed at shifting this responsibility onto third countries. Worse still, the Member States do not hesitate in violating their own obligations, for example by referring to the readmission agreements and sending people back to countries in which their safety is not guaranteed. The project to create so-called ‘regional protection’ areas in countries such as Belarus is also in keeping with this idea.
Finally, the Member States are playing an active part in making the policy of imprisoning migrants and asylum seekers an everyday occurrence, and are going as far as to fund secure detention centres in third countries such as Libya and Mauritania. The European Union must urgently review its policy and listen to the sub-Saharan, North African and European civil societies. A large number of members of these civil societies were gathered together in Rabat last week, and they adopted recommendations that deserve to be taken into account."@en1
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