On 25 June 2024, PACE adopted a resolution based on a report prepared by Stephanie Krisper (ALDE, Austria) on Ensuring human rights-compliant asylum procedures. The document expressed PACE’s profound concern at the “instrumentalisation and exaggeration” of migration into Europe, which was being “orchestrated for political purposes domestically or by certain external regimes as a means of exerting pressure on European countries for other purposes”.
In her opening remarks to the plenary debate, Rapporteur Krisper declared:
“As we are gathered here today, millions of people are fleeing war, persecution and human rights violations, and only a small percentage of those fleeing are seeking refuge in Europe from war-torn countries mainly, like Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Protection seekers on European soil often experience violence. Also from national police especially at borders via pushbacks. Chaos and suffering are the consequences. Those individuals who are lucky to be able to raise a claim for international protection are confronted then with another obstacle to seek protection and I will call it “the asylum lottery” because there are highly divergent recognition rates among the member states of the Council of Europe.
This is exactly also what my fact-based Report demonstrates. And it is an unbearable situation that asylum seekers’ human rights are guaranteed or not depending on what route they have to take and where they end up claiming asylum”.
