The new European Commission committed to “managing migration in an orderly way with solidarity at its heart.” But so far, all it has done is exacerbate existing issues and create new ones. A lack of safe and regular pathways continues to bring death and violence on the migration route towards Europe; in 2024 alone, more than 2,200 people lost their lives in the Mediterranean. Moreover, instead of protecting people seeking safety and shelter, European governments continue to externalise the EU’s borders, paying countries such as Albania, Libya, and Tunisia to detain people trying to reach Europe. Meanwhile, migrant rescue groups that aim to help refugees are being increasingly criminalised and in some cases, even spied on.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has promised to take a hard approach to migration and to increase deportations from the bloc. Despite protests from human rights groups, the European Commission has blamed the violence and deaths at European borders on migrant “smuggling” networks, which it claims, on methodologically insufficient and flimsy grounds, are responsible for “over 90% of irregular migrants and asylum seekers are being smuggled to the EU.” It has used this baseless assumption as the pretext to propose a new legislation package “to prevent and combat migrant smuggling,” which includes a new Europol Regulation. This tasks EU police agency Europol with leading the fight against migrant “smuggling,” providing it with greater surveillance powers and a significant budget increase. But this is a systematically flawed proposal that cannot be fixed, and which the European Parliament must reject.
The #ProtectNotSurveil coalition, co-led by Access Now, EDRi, and the Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice, has produced a joint analysis of the proposed regulation, which reveals how it would irreversibly harm human rights and increase criminalisation and automated suspicion of racialised groups in the EU. Our analysis explores:
- How the Europol Regulation increases the criminalisation of migrants and solidarity initiatives;
- How the Commission failed to conduct an evidence-based impact assessment for its proposal;
- How the regulation will expand the EU’s digital surveillance infrastructure against migrants, including an increase in biometric surveillance, bulk data collection, data exchange with non-European countries, and the criminalisation of online content deemed to be “instigating” irregular migration.
There is still time for the European Parliament to reject the regulation and push the European Commission to instead shift its hostile migration policies towards an approach that prioritises people’s safety and human rights.