MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th November, 2020) European Parliament President David Sassoli on Thursday has offered his support to the European Commission's New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which calls for establishing flexible and more efficient procedures and a sharing of responsibility for migrants across the bloc.
"I'd like to welcome the proposal from the European Commission to have a pact on migration and asylum. This is a package of legislative proposals, which does represent a foundation for our work," Sassoli said at the EU's High-level Inter-parliamentary Conference on Migration and Asylum.
The European Commission in late September unveiled its plans for establishing a new system governing migration and asylum procedures. In a press release, the commission said that the system would look to rebuild trust and ease the pressures on the bloc's external borders by requiring member states to share responsibility for migrants.
"First of all, we need to share responsibility. We have a collective responsibility for welcoming people, for organizing identification procedures, for supporting the analysis and the examination of asylum requests and welcoming refugees and carrying out repatriation work," the European Parliament president remarked.
Sassoli also said that the bloc needed a system of rules to save people at sea "without making criminals" of those who save lives. The European Union's new migration system should also create legal channels for work-based immigration and establish a framework for police and intelligence services to dismantle criminal groups, the European Parliament president said.
As many as 84,340 migrants and asylum seekers have reached Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, and Malta using land and sea routes from Turkey and North Africa throughout 2020 to date, according to data published by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The number of arrivals in 2019 totaled 123,663.�
