Tackling immigration to improve security

13.6.2022

Priority question for written answer  P-002110/2022
to the Commission
Rule 138
Jean-Paul Garraud (ID)

Major incidents occurred at the Champions League final held on Saturday 28 May 2022 at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis.

While the French Minister for the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, pinned the blame on English supporters that same evening, countless witnesses told another version of the story, in which gangs of foreigners or people with a foreign background were responsible.

For example, police officer Abdoulaye Kanté told a news channel that half of the hundred or so people arrested had no ID and looked like migrants. Police custody records also show that there is an overrepresentation of individuals from the Maghreb or of Maghreb origin in cases of robbery with violence, group theft, pickpocketing, participation in an armed group, vandalism, trespassing, offensive behaviour, carjacking, possession of stolen goods and deliberate violence.

Furthermore, some Spanish witnesses reported sexual assaults, particularly on minors, recalling the acts committed by individuals of North African origin on 31 December 2015 in Cologne and on 31 December 2021 in Milan.

In the light of these witness accounts proving that immigration is a security issue, does the Commission not consider it necessary to step up expulsions and the EU’s border security, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea, where illegal immigration is on the rise?