Doha-the European Commission has officially included Morocco in their first list of “safe countries of origin” together with six other nations in order to consider considerable asylum opportunities for citizens from these countries.
The decision announced on Wednesday aims to accelerate the processing of asylum sayings and accelerate Returns of rejected applicants.
The list includes Kosovo, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Morocco and Tunisia. According to the Commission, the citizens from these countries do not have the typical profile of refugees, which would enable faster processing of their asylum applications.
“The fact that a country is not in the list now does not mean that this country is necessarily not safe” told Euronews, who explains that the list is “dynamic” and can be expanded or restricted in the countries concerned due to the developing human rights conditions.
The proposal must still receive the approval of the European Parliament and the EU member states before they come into force in all 27 nations. If this is accepted, this would mark the first harmonized EU-wide list, although there are already several countries maintain Their own national lists of the “safe” countries.
France, for example, comprises around ten countries on its safe list, including Mongolia, Serbia and Cape Verde. The list of Italy is more extensive and comprises 19 nations such as Ghana, Senegal and Algeria.
According to European officials, these different national lists are currently encouraging asylum seekers to aim at countries with more flexible criteria.
The Italian government, which urged the measure, celebrated the announcement as a “success for the Italian government”, as reported from the statements of several news agencies.
According to reports, France has now reported more reserved during the negotiations and prefers to evaluate the Commission’s proposal to his merits.
Read too: Morocco, France announces the creation of the common migration -Sksk Force
Humanitarian organizations have sharply criticized the initiative. The rights of Euromed described the name of these seven countries as “safe” both “misleading and dangerous” and referred the persistent human rights concerns in several of the listed nations.
The Commission rejected this criticism and insisted that the list “The guarantees that are offered asylum seekers are not eliminated,” said the Commission’s spokesman, Markus Lammert.
For Morocco, the inclusion of this list is the recognition of its efforts in the migration government. Since 2013, the country has carried out a national strategy for immigration and asylum (Snia), in which tens of thousands of migrants are regulated south of the Sahara and social and pedagogical services are opened to this population.
This latest EU initiative takes place under the growing pressure on Brussels strain Migration policy after the rise of legal and right -wing extremists on the entire continent.
In mid-March, the Commission had already presented measures to accelerate the deportations of irregular migrants, including a legal framework for the creation of migrant centers outside the EU boundaries, which are referred to as “return hubs”.
An earlier attempt to create a similar list in 2015 was given up on the basis of heated debates whether they should include Turkey, since concerns about the independence of judicial independence, the rights of minorities and freedom of the press are included there.
The new proposal takes into account that most EU candidate countries – including Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Nord -Macedonia, Serbia and Turkiye – instruct the criteria for the designation as safe countries of origin with the temporary exception of Ukraine by the long.