The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum Enters into Force: Institutionalising Border Violence Across Europe

Today, the EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum (the Pact) enters into force, marking a devastating blow to the right to seek asylum and the respect for international law in Europe. While presented by the European Union as a historic agreement to efficiently “manage migration,” the implementation of the Pact will further entrench border violence, pushbacks, detention and substandard conditions in reception centres with grave consequences for people on the move:

• The Screening process will rely heavily on detention and very limited procedural safeguards, reinforced by the legal fiction of non-entry. 

• Through the Safe-third country principle people’s asylum claim will be declared inadmissible on wide grounds, and risk being deported to countries they have no connection with, severely heightening the risk of refoulement. 

• Border Procedures will allow for nearly indiscriminate detention, keeping people in border areas, limit procedural safeguards that help ensure fair and effective individualized assessments, and impose an extremely fast turnover from asylum application to deportation. 

• The Crisis and Force majeure framing, has reproduced a dangerous approach reinforcing the “crisification” of migration, normalizing derogations from asylum safeguards and creating conditions that risk undermining the effective protection of fundamental rights, including the prohibition of collective expulsions. 

• The Pact will also expand racial profiling of those already in the territory, and will make use of the problematic mass surveillance regime to identify and target who could pose a “security threat.” 

Following the Pact’s adoption by the European Parliament in April 2024, member states were given a two-year transition period to prepare for implementation and submit national implementation plans. As the Pact comes into force today, it will worsen practices that BVMN and its member organisations have documented for years across Europe’s borders: violent pushbacks and returns, de facto and arbitrary detention, restriction of access to asylum, substandard conditions in reception centres, and the criminalisation of people on the move and those supporting them.

One of the clearest examples of the Pact's future trajectory can be found in Greece. Civil society organisations have long highlighted the harms which stem from the model of Closed Control Access Centres (CCAC) in Greece, and warned against its use as a blueprint for the implementation of the Pact. Yet, with the Pact now coming in force, prison-like facilities such as the Samos CCAC will become the new norm not just in Greece but in all of Europe.

The recently proposed draft law for implementing the pact in Greece is a reflection of the migration policies of the Greek government of the past years, opting for the most restrictive and punishing options that are available within the new EU Regulations and Directives. Among others, it heavily expands the grounds for detention or detention-like conditions, weakens procedural safeguards, impacting timeframes for asylum procedures, weakens vulnerability assessments and safeguards, and restricts access for lawyers and NGOs. As it also introduces a 'non-entry' legal fiction in line with the Asylum Procedure Regulation, it creates serious uncertainty about how the rights of people arriving in Greece will be upheld. Once more, the consequences of decisions made in Brussels will be felt most acutely by those who are coming to Europe and face an impossible asylum system geared towards deterrence and deportations. 

The migration policy experiments of the past years, spearheaded by Greece, are now becoming mandatory for all of the EU. We expect that in the competition of trying to find the most inhumane migration system in the EU, Greece will continue to push the limits of its border regime.

Also for Bulgaria, the Pact represents a fundamental transformation of its asylum and migration system. In line with the Pact, Bulgaria will introduce screening and border procedures and restructure camps and detention facilities, with infrastructure and decision-making increasingly concentrated in border regions as part of a broader trend towards externalisation. For years, Bulgaria has been a blind spot for its border practices despite managing one of the EU’s longest and most complex land external borders, particularly with Turkey, a border widely associated with pushbacks and systemic human rights violations.

Bulgaria enters the implementation of the Pact without finalized national implementation legislation in a context marked by significant legal and institutional gaps. In particular, no national monitoring mechanism is yet in place. The independent monitoring mechanism foreseen under the Pact is performative and formalistic, lacking the necessary powers to ensure meaningful oversight or accountability for violations of human rights. At the national level, the Ombudsman is expected to monitor compliance with fundamental rights in the new screening centres. However, as of today, Bulgaria has neither finalized the necessary legislation nor allocated dedicated resources for this task, creating a significant accountability gap and reinforcing the weaknesses of the Pact’s monitoring framework.

Equally concerning is the judicial passivism of the national courts. With new rules set to apply imminently, there has been no clear indication that Bulgaria courts are institutionally prepared to address the challenges of the Pact’s implementation and ensure legal certainty in the absence of an adopted national legal framework.

The impact of the Pact is particularly evident in its treatment of unaccompanied children. Under the Bulgarian asylum law to date, unaccompanied minors have been granted access to asylum procedures. Under the Pact, however, they may be subjected to border and accelerated procedures and even classified as national security threats. Additional restrictions have been proposed at the national level, including limiting the right of unaccompanied minors aged 15 to apply for family reunification.

The design of the Pact, marked by structural over-complexity and legal ambiguity, enables unlimited and unchecked powers of the authorities over access to asylum and fundamental rights. In Bulgaria, institutional and legal gaps add to the risk of arbitrary state practices, providing the administration with more incentives to sabotage accountability.

The implementation of the Pact comes at a time of accelerating disenfranchisement of people on the move alongside a dangerous erosion of international law. Next week, the European Parliament will likely vote on and adopt the new EU Deportation Regulation, the last piece of the EU Migration Pact. The Regulation  establishes the most reaching and punitive deportation regime yet. By aligning with far-right priorities, centre-right parties have enabled measures, such as home raids and seizures, that mirror ICE-style deportations and will significantly expand the use of detention as a tool of control. At the same time, the planned revision of the Frontex Regulation this year threatens to further expand the agency’s operational powers, despite its long and well-documented record of involvement in pushbacks and human rights violations at Europe’s borders. 

Simultaneously, the EU continues to invest heavily in its expanding “electronic frontier,” pouring vast resources into surveillance technologies that fortify borders while obscuring harm and responsibility. What is intensifying is a system in which violence, pushbacks, torture, deaths, and disappearances are systematically hidden from public view. This is alarming, especially because in recent years BVMN and its member organisations have seen a stark impact on the ability to monitor border violence. Due to border surveillance, border fortification, and more efficient apprehensions and pushbacks, increased use of detention, access to safe spaces where people on the move can share their experiences of border violence is successively limited. 

In light of the Pact’s implementation, the proposed Deportation Regulation, and the expansion of Frontex capacities, independent monitoring of border violence through civil society remains more crucial than ever. We must continue to document and expose abuses, ensure that the limited safeguards contained within the Pact are respected, and resist laws and institutions that institutionalise and codify border violence across Europe.

Signatories: 

• Border Violence Monitoring Network
• I Have Rights
• Mobile Info Team
• Centre for Legal Aid
• Infokolpa
• Mültecilerle Dayanışma Derneği
• Legal Centre Lesvos