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Verbatim report of proceedings
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 - Strasbourg OJ edition

Establishment of a joint EU resettlement programme (debate)
MPphoto
 

  Claude Moraes, on behalf of the S&D Group. Mr President, the Commissioner said two things which I think are very important. One is that we should analyse properly the counter-proposal by the rapporteur, because I think what Mr Tavares is trying to do is get some movement here on something which is frustrating colleagues right across the political spectrum, as we heard in the speeches by the authors of the oral question. Secondly, you said that we need to have future financing and a stable position for future resettlement so that we do not keep coming back with oral questions in this frustrating way.

For our group it is very simple: if we do not find a solution before the end of 2011, we jeopardise the planned use of the European Refugee Fund, which lapses in 2013. Secondly, Member States will not receive the extra funds allocated by the European Refugee Fund; and thirdly, of course, the emergency mechanism provided for in this codecision, which we could have used in the context of the Arab Spring, will continue to remain inoperative.

It is very clear that there is agreement that, while we spend many hours in this Parliament and in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs talking about common asylum policies, resettlement is a way of managing, in a very coordinated and sometimes symbolic way, the pressures that we now see in the Mediterranean. For this reason, we can contrast – as other speakers have said – the way that we operate our resettlement programme (with fairly small numbers and some inaction from the Council) with what has happened with the US and Canada, for example, where so many more thousands of refugees have been resettled in a coordinated way.

In order for the EU better to respond to such situations, the European Parliament adopted this codecision report on the European Refugee Fund as far back as May 2010. As the Commissioner has just said, it is deeply frustrating that we are constantly coming back to this Parliament to find a solution.

We therefore wanted this debate today because we need answers. Parliament has put proposals on the table aimed at finding a solution to the delegated acts issue, but this has met with silence from the Council. This is obviously unacceptable, and we fully expect the Council to inform us of its position on delegated acts in a way that is credible, and on all the positive aspects of this report.

The pressure on the Council must be maintained. We are frustrated in Parliament across the parties, and I think we will continue to push this issue, because it is a managed and humane way of dealing with some of the consequences of the Arab Spring. In future we will have crises on which we want a stable policy, and that is what our group wants, in common with the other groups in this House.

 
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