Reaction to yesterday’s Cabinet decision to opt-in to the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact has been swift and mixed, to put it mildly.
The EU and our own Government believe it is an important tool that will help streamline and strengthen efforts to reduce ‘irregular migration’ while others believe it is yet another EU plan that if adopted will erode even further what little ability we have left to determine our own national immigration policies.
One of the key reasons provided by Minister McEntee around why the EU’s Pact is so important is that it will allow Eurodac, which is the European database that stores the fingerprints of international protection applicants and irregular migrants, to now include children aged six and above.
This, she says, will enhance protections for children and combat child trafficking.
It may very well do so.
The question I would raise, in the context of using this as a rationale to argue for the necessity of Oireachtas agreement on the opt-in is this; isn’t the EU already seeking to put in place enhanced protections to combat human and thereby child trafficking and if it is why is this element of the EU Pact necessary?
I ask this because one of the very first items on the Government’s agenda when the Dáil returns on 9 April is to bring forward for approval a proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the EU Council on “enhancing police cooperation in relation to the prevention, detection and investigation of migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings, and on enhancing Europol’s support to preventing and combating such crimes and amending Regulation (EU) 2016/794.”
This proposal aims, among many other things, to provide the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, Europol, with “the necessary advanced tools to support Member States in preventing and combating migrant smuggling and other crimes falling within the scope of Europol’s objectives.”
So, again, why is Government saying the EU Migration Pact is necessary when steps are already being taken to combat child and human trafficking through separate EU proposals?
Is it nothing more than a kind of legislative emotional blackmail or regulatory arm-twisting? After all, who could possibly argue against measures to combat human trafficking, right?
The proposal that the Dáil will debate in April also aims to establish operational task forces within member states, including Ireland, to conduct joint, coordinated and prioritised criminal intelligence activities and investigations “notably on criminal networks and groups and individual criminal actors.”
What is very clear is that we urgently need to address the growing problem Ireland is being confronted with in terms of criminal networks of this kind.
Is the EU Pact the way to do that or is there another more appropriate way; to beef up Europol and allow it to aggressively tackle the gangs and networks engaged in this heinous activity? This is to say nothing about the measures already in place within the EU Security Union Strategy or indeed the EU Strategy to tackle Organised Crime. Is it another pact we need, or do we need to reexamine and enforce what we already have?
After all, it will not have gone unnoticed that part of the political sales pitch we are being fed for the EU Migration and Asylum Pact is that without it we will be toothless in combatting the irregular migration and criminal operations that facilitate it.
It is certainly the case that this aspect is highlighted repeatedly in many of the European Commission’s own statements on migration including on the EU Pact.
All of this is merely to say that when you look closely at the justifications provided for the necessity of the EU Pact, they are far less solid than they first appear.
We have only looked at one aspect, that of human trafficking, in an overview kind of way.
What would happen if we pulled the other threads? How quickly would the entire thing unravel?