Fine Gael’s European partners plan a harsh new anti-migrant policy for the EU if they prevail in elections to the Brussels parliament in June, a Fianna Fáil MEP has said.
The manifesto of the European People’s Party (EPP), to which Fine Gael belongs, was adopted in Bucharest last week at a congress attended by Leo Varadkar.
It calls for stepped-up deportations, the designation of a range of new safe countries to which people can be returned and deals with external countries that can take unwanted migrants for “processing”.
Barry Andrews said the EPP’s leader, Ursula von der Leyen, whom the Taoiseach helped to re-elect last week, “has already agreed a deal with Tunisia on migrant returns despite evidence of widespread human rights abuses”.
He said: “These abuses are being swept aside for political expediency.”
The same could be expected if there were new arrangements with countries who were prepared to trade people-processing for cash, he said.
“Leo Varadkar offered reassurances that these new deals would be fully compliant with the Geneva Conventions,” the MEP for Dublin said.
“This is an odd comment, as the Geneva Conventions govern the conduct of hostilities.
“That aside, I struggle to see how these new deals would even be compliant with those international and European human rights laws that actually apply.”
Asked about the “very strong new policies and reforms on migration” in the EPP manifesto, Fine Gael leader Mr Varadkar said: “What is contained in the EU asylum pact, which Ireland has signed up to, is the possibility that asylum-seekers could be processed in a third country.
“What we’re saying very strictly is that anything that’s done – and we’ve been part of making sure this language was included in the manifesto – has to be in line with Geneva Conventions and also the European Convention on Human Rights.
“So it’s not the European version of what the UK is proposing in Rwanda, in my view. It would be something very different.
“But Italy, for example, has made an agreement recently with Albania that people seeking asylum could be processed there. And we have an EU arrangement with Tunisia, which I’m not a huge fan of, but it’s more in that space.”
Fine Gael MEPs Seán Kelly, Deirdre Clune and Frances Fitzgerald supported the new manifesto, which they said had Fine Gael inputs.
The Dublin Convention has been overtaken by events and is unfair to countries such as Greece, Malta and Italy, they claimed, since it mandates the return of illegal migrants to the EU country of first landfall.
They also denied the migration pact would be a version of Britain’s Rwanda policy.
Mrs Fitzgerald said deportations were going to increase and there would be a continuously updated list of safe countries, to which Georgia has been added.
“The big push in Europe and feeling is we ought to have clarity on migration policy, because countries have been a little bit all over the place,” she said.
“That means emphasising the role of Frontex [the European border agency] and keeping up human rights standards, but saying that borders are borders.”
