Taking back the word ‘given’
- Frontex investigation on Pylos shipwreck, legalisation of police checks on racialised communities and yet another billion-euros deal to prevent migration
- EP sues the European Commission for misuse of taxpayers’ money and breach of EU law
- Unpaid work is still legal in the EU, with a proposal for a directive that does not ban unpaid traineeships
- EU electoral manifestos are out, with little attention to protection of civic space
- EU Commission and Council undemocratically review environmental agricultural standards, ignoring civil society’s requests
Who is to blame for the Union’s shortcomings on migration?
Tensions over migration are rising on many fronts in the European Union. The EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly published a report investigating the role of Frontex, Europe’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, in the Pylos shipwreck. The tragedy took place on 14 June 2023, when a boat with hundreds of migrants on board sank in the Greek Search and Rescue (SAR) zone in the Mediterranean Sea. Frontex was established ‘to ensure safe and well-functioning external borders for a European Area’. However, as the Ombudsman puts it, “there is obvious tension between Frontex’s fundamental rights obligations and its duty to support Member States in border management control”. There are many issues that lead to human rights violations in cases like this. First, there is a lack of an independent investigating system at EU level that could verify the compliance of SAR missions with international law. Another problem that contributes to a lack of accountability when tragedies like Pylos happen, is Frontex’s reliance on Member States when a migrant boat is in distress. Frontex has “no internal guidelines on issuing emergency signals and there is a failure to ensure that Frontex’s fundamental rights monitors are sufficiently involved in decision making on maritime emergencies”, the report states. For now, it seems like no one will take on responsibility for what happened despite the fact that an EU agency and a Member State (Greece) watched 600 people drown.
In the last month many civil society and human rights organisations, among which is Inter Alia, have renewed their concerns towards MEPs on the reform of the Schengen Border Code, which was voted by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on 18 March. This reform aims at fully reopening the Schengen area of free movement, which is currently threatened by temporary internal border controls. In practice, it proposes to legalise and expand targeted checks on racialised communities, giving police the right to stop people near internal borders in order to reduce potential irregular border crossings. While the European Commission’s explanation specifies that such a measure should be applied as a last resort in exceptional situations, there have already been 11 cases of the reintroduction of internal border checks, each of them lasting from two to six months. Considering that this measure is directly linked to racial profiling, it will justify hundreds if not thousands of such cases through EU law. This sends a clear message about the bloc’s values – a false sense of security for “us” in exchange for the dignity of “others”.
It seems that, in a bid to curb migration, the Commission strikes a new third-country deal every month. This March, Ursula von der Leyen is ready to give grants and loans worth 7.4 billion euros to Egypt. Most of the aid (5 billion euros) will be given directly to the government, which is unusual, as the normal practice is to fund the work of NGOs or to co-finance specific projects. The President of Egypt Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who has been in power for over 10 years, is widely considered to be an autocratic leader. He has been accused of bloody crackdown on dissent, making sure that Courts pass death sentences to the supporters of his rivals. It’s the work of this government that the Commission decided to subsidise directly with European taxpayers’ money. It’s no surprise that MEPs’ discontent grows with such deals. Not only is the European Parliament frustrated by the fact that the money goes to non-democratic regimes guilty of human rights abuses, but also because the Parliament gets sidelined in the decision-making process. The officials elected by the people in EU Member States point out that they are not able to express their views on budget concerns and are effectively being ignored.
The Parliament takes the Commission to court and the Media Freedom Act is officially adopted
The European Commission’s actions around migration are not the only things upsetting MEPs. This month Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee decided to sue the Commission over its 10.2 billion euro payoff for Hungary. These funds had been blocked because of rule of law and corruption concerns until last December, when Victor Orbán threatened to veto the 50 billion euro Ukraine aid package and the Commission caved in to him by unfreezing the funds. The European Parliament argued, rightfully so, that the Commission breached its obligation to protect taxpayers’ money from being misused. It’s worth noting that the European People’s Party (EPP), von der Leyen’s political family, supported the decision, although in a joint statement they placed the blame on the entire College of Commissioners, rather than on the President herself. Thus, the Parliament aimed at sending a clear message regarding the importance of democracy to the bloc, a value that the Commission has been forgetting lately.
The European Media Freedom Act has been officially adopted by the Parliament. Back in October, Inter Alia and other organisations discussed the missed opportunity to ban the use of spyware on journalists. Moreover, there were concerns regarding disinformation, as the new law prevents big online platforms such as X and Facebook from deleting or restricting media content in the first 24 hours after it gets published. That means that there will be a 24-hour-long window for any fake news to stay on these media. Months after Inter Alia and other organisations first discussed the Act and its shortfalls, on 12 March, the Act was voted through with no significant changes.
What is the EU actually doing to curb youth unemployment?
On 11 March, EU Ministers for Employment and Social Policy met to endorse key messages from the Employment Committee – an advisory committee for Ministers to promote the coordination of employment and labour market policies at EU and national level – on the implementation of the Youth Guarantee. The latter is a recommendation published in 2020, when all EU countries committed to ensuring that all young people under 30 years old receive a good-quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or traineeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education.
In many Member States, this instrument is the only policy that has attempted to tackle youth unemployment, especially during the Covid pandemic, but it has not succeeded in limiting the development of precarious working conditions. According to the European Trade Union Confederation, it has been used by Member States to hide unemployment data by offering low-quality traineeships which, coupled with the absence of social protection in these contracts, result in exploiting and putting young people at risk of poverty and social exclusion.
The European Commission has recently proposed some regulatory tools to support youth employment, namely a directive to better regulate traineeships and the revision of the Quality Framework for Traineeships. These, however, have been strongly criticised by civil society organisations and trade unions for being ambiguous in its wording and not ambitious enough. The crucial point is that the directive does not ensure a total ban on unpaid traineeships, while the notion of “fair pay” is only present in the Council recommendation which is not mandatory, as opposed to a directive which is legally binding.
Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, Nicholas Schmit, tried to justify this by explaining that the Commission does not have legal power to impose the ban of unpaid internships on Member States, as employment is a policy on which EU countries have full competence. However, work is a basic human right, and free work means exploitation and discrimination, which is against EU values. Moreover, the Directive fails to point out how employers must be held accountable for establishing poor-quality and exploitative employment relationships disguised as traineeships.
EU elections: lead candidates and electoral manifestos are out
As the EU election day is approaching, European parties have started revealing their lead candidates, who will run for the post of President of the European Commission. This procedure, also known as the Spitzenkandidaten system, foresees that the party who gains more seats is able to choose the EC President, after being proposed by EU Heads of State and approved by the European Parliament. Despite this process being created to make EU elections more accessible for electors and to increase participation, it has never worked in practice. In the 2019 elections, in fact, the candidate chosen by the EPP (the conservative party who gained the most seats) was in the end overtaken by Ursula von der Leyen who, as we know, became EC President.
The EPP has confirmed Von der Leyen as a candidate for the second mandate, and she is also “the one to beat”. At the moment, the only candidate who could compete is the current Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, Nicholas Schmit, from the Party of European Socialists . With a not-so-ambitious agenda and a lead candidate who is not well–known enough to challenge the current EC President, it looks like the centre-left is on the defensive. The Greens chose two names, Terry Reintke and Bas Eickhout, while The Left party selected their only contender Walter Baier, and both have extremely low chances of winning this race. Meanwhile, the right wing keeps growing across the EU, with the far right, xenophobic and racist party Chega winning 48 seats in the Parliament.
The two major European Parties, EPP and S&D, chose their lead candidates to run as President of the European Commission. (Photos: left – Euronews; right – European People’s Party)
Almost all European parties have also published their electoral manifestos, serving as a roadmap for the priorities for the next five-year legislative term. As part of the campaign “Civil Society for EU”, and given the worrying trends in shrinking space for civil society actors across the EU, Inter Alia is paying particular attention to the European parties’ positions and programmes for protection of civic space and engagement with civil society.
Unfortunately, almost all manifestos, from the EPP to The Left, from the Party of European Socialists to ALDE (corresponding to Renew inside the EP), only symbolically mention civil society as crucial for a healthy democracy without, however, presenting any concrete measures to protect civic space and European civil society organisations’ work and enhancing participation in decision-making processes. The only manifesto which presents some concrete actions to reverse the trend of the suppression of civic space is the European Greens’, which calls for increased funding to non-profits, advocates for an EU-level civil dialogue between CSOs and EU institutions, underlines the need for a framework to protect journalists and the emergence of pan-European media outlets for quality content on EU affairs.
Although some steps have been made, the bar is extremely low when it comes to the importance given to civil society and their – our – role in promoting and protecting democracy and those “common values” the EU allegedly upholds.
The EU is undemocratically breaching its own rules on environmental protection
The EU Council has approved a proposal to support farmers and review basic aspects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): the measures speed up the collapse of biodiversity, removing basic agricultural good practices to preserve the environment and exempting farmers from respecting sustainable requirements, needed to receive public subsidies. The citizens’ committee promoting the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) to ban pesticides, together with other environmental organisations, sent a letter to the European Commission underlining that the attack on environmental protection is undemocratic, outrageous and threatens the legitimacy of the CAP, disregarding democracy and due democratic process.
In fact, the Commission, pushed by the EPP, fast-tracked decisions based on a last-minute, no-negotiation opening up of a law to eliminate rules that make sure agricultural practices respect environmental protection standards. These rules were only adopted three years ago, after more than four years of negotiations. Also, no impact assessment has been carried out to examine the implications of these proposed measures, acting against science without any supporting data nor stakeholder consultations.
The CAP budget comprises one third of the entire EU budget, about 55 billion euros of taxpayers money annually. Ignoring citizens’ requests and wishes that have been collected through lengthy and complex mechanisms such as the collection of over a million signatures for an ECI asking for sustainable farming, is simply undemocratic. Under the political pressure of farmers’ requests, these measures will eventually not help farmers, but harm agriculture, biodiversity and EU citizens.
