In this session of the online discussion series Café Europa we discuss the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum. A historic agreement reached last June among the 27 EU states that now needs to be negotiated to implement the points it includes.
What are the keys to the migration pact? What points divide states? Is Europe in solidarity with migrants and refugees? What is the current legislation? How can we guarantee the human rights of migrants and refugees? These are some of the questions in the debate.
Today, we are at a crucial moment because the proposals of the pact must be deployed. Some have already been approved and launched, but others are blocked in negotiations between Parliament, the Commission and the Member States. In this process, Spain can play a key role as the current President of the EU Council. The intention is to close the migration pact before the end of the European legislature and the European elections in June next year.
We talked to two experts in this field:
- Raül Hernández Sagrera, Member of the Cabinet of the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs of the European Commission, Ylva Johansson.
- Cristina Fernández-Durán, senior policy advisor for the European Union-Sahel and migration and asylum specialist at Oxfam Intermón.
The presentation of the session was given by Mark Jeffery, founding partner of the Horizonte Europa Association and professor of the Ramon Llull University, and moderated by Júlia Mumany, project manager of the Fundació Catalunya Europa.
On this occasion, the literary recommendation of the bookstore Nollegiu is the title "Starting to tell", an excellent first-person story by Mahmud Traoré, a young Senegalese who took more than three years to reach Europe, on a journey through the Sahel, the Sahara, Libya and the Maghreb.
This odyssey led him in September 2005 to participate in the collective assault of more than 600 sub-Saharan migrants on the Ceuta border, which had a great impact, since very few succeeded. The story portrays the hard life of a clandestine migrant and explains, among other things, the operation of detention centers.
The cycle of online debates Café Europa is held on the last Friday of each month, with an informative character to bring European and international themes to the citizens.
You can recover this session of the cycle Café Europa in the YouTube channel of the Fundació Catalunya Europa and also in the podcast Café Europa of the platform Ivoox.
