European pact on migration and asylum: A sacrifice or normative values for efficiency?

Abstract

On 23 September 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migrants and Asylum for a more holistic migration management system that is suggested to be reliable and predictable with comprehensive approaches. The Pact is based on two main "developments" to the current challenges at borders. Firstly, it is expected to vastly accelerate the procedures, which are proposed to be limited to 5 days for the initial process and 12 weeks in total for the appeal period. Therefore, neither borders will be piled up with migrants, nor those migrants will have to wait in the detention centers for a longer period. The second aspect of the Pact is to ensure fair burden-sharing and solidarity of the host Member States which are entitled to relocate the migrants in (or in the name of) another Member State, to encourage those who have been seeking asylum to return or to provide operational support unless they are able to perform the first two actions. As such, the Pact is claimed to strengthen internal and external management with common governance of migration not by an individual Member State but by the whole EU.