European Migration Forum: Conclusions & Policy Recommendations

On 30 January we reported our Director’s participation at the first ‘European Migration Forum: Safe Routes, Safe Futures: How to managed mixed flows of migrants across the Mediterranean’. During the Forum Neil delivered a forceful presentation on the human rights challenges the EU should be considering in its discussions on the Mediterranean and access to territory and protection by migrants and refugees. In his presentation Neil also made an urgent appeal to the EU to stop ignoring civil society organisations, and to stop treating them exclusively as service-providers filling the gaps created by Member States’ attitudes towards migrants and refugees.

eumigrationforumcover

We are now happy to share with you the Forum’s final information and documentation, together with a key document containing the Forum’s Conclusions and Policies Recommendations (.pdf). The document highlights 5 cross-cutting recommendations made in the Forum’s 4 workshops, as follows:

  1. the need to carry out a stocktaking exercise of existing EU legal and policy instruments, so as to ensure coherence in law- and policy-making;
  2. accountability and independent monitoring of Member States’ activities to guarantee access to effective remedies and compliance with fundamental rights norms;
  3. development of legal and regular channels to Europe for refugees and other migrants in the form of an ‘EU mobility toolbox’;
  4. respect for the rights of undocumented migrants, the decriminalisation of migration and of humanitarian assistance.

We’re happy to have participated in this Forum, and honoured to have been invited to present our views from the ground.