Image: Council of the EU
The precise content of the law was, apparently, not exactly known to the co-legislators at the time of their “historic agreement” in December, leaving many of those involved in something of a state of confusion.
A press release published by the Belgian Council Presidency last week, following an informal Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting, said:
“Since January, technical discussions on the Pact’s texts have continued with high intensity by both co-legislators and the Commission, and the negotiation teams are working hard in order to translate the political agreement into a formal agreement. At the end of April, from the 28 to 30th and a ministerial conference will be organized specifically in order to put this operationalization of the Pact on track.”
Some of the texts that should make up those formal agreements have now begun to emerge, at least within the institutions.
Statewatch is making two of them available to the public: the Asylum Procedure Regulation, which is supposed to set out a common procedure for dealing with claims for international protection in the EU (replacing the Asylum Procedures Directive); and the Eurodac Regulation, which will expand the EU’s database for asylum-seekers’ fingerprints to a much larger, broader system for capturing fingerprints, photos and other data on irregular migrants, transforming it into a system “for wider migration purposes,” for example by storing data on people to facilitate deportations.
- Asylum Procedure Regulation
- Eurodac Regulation
- Consolidated text (pdf)
- Four-column document (pdf)
