EU Action Plan against migrant smuggling
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.The current refugee crisis is the greatest humanitarian problem to have faced the European Union since its foundation. It is part of a greater crisis affecting a number of regions across the world: according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 60 million people have been displaced from their homes,1 the largest number since the Second World War.2
2.Across the world individuals are leaving their homes and taking dangerous journeys in an attempt to reach countries of greater safety or economic prosperity. More than 4,000 have died making such journeys so far in 2015, the majority of whom (over 70 per cent) died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe.3 The dangers of the Mediterranean route became notorious when on 3 October 2013 a boat carrying some 500 migrants from Africa, mostly Eritrean and Somali nationals, caught fire and sank off the coast of Lampedusa with the loss of 366 lives. Since that time, the EU and Member States have vacillated in taking responsibility for dealing with this crisis. More tragic incidents have followed. In the first half of 2015 alone 1,700 migrants4 died at sea, including roughly 800 in a single incident off the coast of Libya on 19 April 2015.
The EU’s Action Plan against migrant smuggling
3.The European Commission adopted its wide-ranging European Agenda on Migration on 13 May 2015, with a view in part to addressing this crisis. The crisis is of such a great size and complexity, though, that we decided to limit the scope of our inquiry to one particular aspect of the EU’s response. We chose to look at the EU Action Plan against migrant smuggling, one of many of the Agenda’s immediate measures.
4.Migrant smuggling is not defined in either the Action Plan or the Agenda on Migration, but both appear to equate it to the offence of ‘facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit or residence’, in respect of which the EU adopted a legal framework, the so-called ‘Facilitators’ Package’, in 2002. One part of this is Directive 2002/90/EC,5 which requires Member States to impose sanctions for such facilitation. It also establishes common definitions for two specific offences:
(a)the intentional assistance of an individual, who is not an EU national, to enter or transit a Member State in breach of that State’s laws concerning the entry or transit of aliens, and
(b)the intentional assistance, for financial gain, of a non-EU national in residing in a Member State in breach of the State’s laws on the residence of aliens.6
5.Migrant smuggling is primarily a crime against the state. It has also been a key factor contributing to the deaths at sea mentioned above, as smugglers pack migrants into unseaworthy, overcrowded boats with little or no regard for safety. It affects not only the Mediterranean, but reaches far inside the EU. On 27 August 2015 a refrigerated lorry purporting to carry chicken products was found on the side of Austria’s A4 motorway. Inside, police discovered the bodies of 71 dead migrants, including one infant. The previous day the lorry had set off from Budapest in Hungary, crossed the border into Austria and been abandoned by its driver. A Syrian passport was found on one of the bodies, indicating that the owner may have been a refugee, though the origin of the other passengers is unknown. Such deaths are being replicated in other areas across the EU, and we are particularly concerned by the recent incidents at Calais.
6.It is perhaps because of such dire incidents that action to combat migrant smuggling has been specifically addressed by a distinct Action Plan within the broader Agenda on Migration. The Action Plan also emphasises the law enforcement aspect of migrant smuggling: it links itself with the European Agenda on Security,7 adopted by the Commission on 28 April 2015, which specified cooperation against migrant smuggling as a priority in the fight against organised crime networks.
7.The Action Plan calls for a stronger EU-level response to migrant smuggling, involving greater cooperation within the EU as well as with third countries of origin and transit and other stakeholders. It aims to take a “multidisciplinary approach” and to cover “all phases and types of migrant smuggling.” At the same time, the Action Plan expressly states that it must be “seen in the broader context of EU efforts to address the root causes of irregular migration.”8
8.The Action Plan against migrant smuggling sets out a number of specific actions intended to implement its strategy. These are grouped under four priorities or objectives:
(1)Enhanced police and judicial response
(2)Improved gathering and sharing of information
(3)Enhanced prevention of smuggling and assistance to vulnerable migrants
(4)Stronger cooperation with third countries.
We discuss these priorities in detail in Chapter 4.
The Committee’s inquiry
9.We launched our inquiry shortly after the Agenda on Migration was published in May 2015. As mentioned above, our intention was not to look at the EU’s response to the refugee crisis as a whole, but to look at one particular aspect of it. Law enforcement action against migrant smuggling is regarded as a priority by many Member States, including the UK. As we stated in the call for evidence,9 the aims of our inquiry were:
- to assess how the Action Plan against migrant smuggling contributes to the stated objectives of the EU’s Agenda on Migration;
- to establish whether or not its four objectives and the actions contained therein are the right ones to achieve the EU’s stated goal of rendering migrant smuggling a “high risk, low return” undertaking;
- to identify whether the Action Plan strikes the right balance between security considerations and the protection of migrants’ human rights; and
- to identify gaps and deficiencies in the current EU response to migrant smuggling in order to make recommendations for planned legislative reform.
10.The European Commission is due to undertake a review of EU legislation on migrant smuggling, which will be published in 2016 along with proposed reforms. It was our intention therefore to scrutinise this policy area ahead of that review.
11.Since our inquiry began, the situation has continued to change rapidly. In July 2015, the number of non-EU nationals reaching the EU rose to over 100,000 in one month for the first time.10 There has been a corresponding significant increase in so-called ‘secondary movement’—that is, migration within the EU from one Member State to another. The Commission has responded by putting forward schemes to resettle more refugees directly from third countries to the EU, and to relocate asylum seekers who have reached the EU, via the overburdened states of Italy and Greece, to other Member States to have their claims processed.
12.Smuggling remains a serious criminal activity, as demonstrated by the incident in Austria mentioned above, and it was our aim throughout our inquiry to shed some light on this specific aspect of the EU’s response to the refugee crisis. At the same time, we were conscious that the Action Plan could not be looked at in isolation and without reference to the wider context. In this report we therefore first examine a number of key concepts and consider how the Action Plan fits within the wider context of the EU’s response to the refugee crisis, before looking more closely at the content of the Action Plan and how it will work in practice.
13.The Action Plan includes several measures intended to enhance cooperation with third countries. The inquiry was conducted by the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee, and we have focused on immigration, policing and internal security aspects of the Action Plan, rather than on broader questions of the EU’s external relations.
14.We received written and oral evidence from a number of witnesses from June to September. We heard from the European Commission, which was responsible for producing the Action Plan, as well as some of the EU Agencies responsible for implementing it. We heard from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which is responsible for acting against organised criminals and cooperating with EU counterparts as part of the Action Plan. Mr James Brokenshire MP, the Minister of State for Immigration at the Home Office, also contributed evidence about the Government’s response to the crisis and the Action Plan. Finally, we heard from a number of academics, NGOs and intergovernmental organisations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We are grateful to all our witnesses for their assistance in the course of our inquiry.
15.We make this report to the House for debate.
2 UNHCR, Global Trend 2013 Report, (20 July 2013): http://unhcr.org/trends2013/ (accessed 26 October 2015)
3 Missing Migrants Project, ‘Latest Global Figures’: http://missingmigrants.iom.int/en/latest-global-figures (accessed 26 October 2015)
4 A migrant is a person who travels from one place to another. The Migration Observatory, ‘Who Counts as a Migrant? Definitions and their consequences’, http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/who-counts-migrant-definitions-and-their-consequences (accessed 26 October 2015). The term has no legal or internationally agreed definition, however. We discuss its connotations in Chapter 2.
5 The other part is Framework Decision 2002/946/JHA on strengthening the penal framework to prevent the facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence. The UK opted out of this Framework Decision in 2014 in accordance with Protocol 36 of the Treaty of Lisbon. Framework Decision 2002/946/JHA: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32002F0946 (accessed 28 October 2015)
6 Both these offences are dealt with in the UK under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971. They each carry a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. Immigration Act 1971, section 25
7 Communication from the Commission: The European Agenda on Security (COM(2015) 185 final)
8 Communication from the Commission: EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (2015–2020) (COM(2015)285 Final)
9 Published on 8 July 2015 (see Appendix 3)
10 Frontex, ‘Number of migrants in one month above 100,000 for first time’ (18 August 2015): http://frontex.europa.eu/news/number-of-migrants-in-one-month-above-100-000-for-first-time-I9MlIo (accessed 28 October 2015)