Twice a year the USA and the EU want to meet to talk about migration and asylum policies

At their most recent meeting in Washington last December, the justice and interior ministers of the EU and the USA revived their “Migration Platform”, which had fallen asleep in 2015. The EU also launched a “migration platform” with Canada in 2016.

Twice a year, the responsible EU-US ministries now want to exchange information on developments in their respective migration and asylum policies. These include the “the prevention of irregular migration, the “fight against migrant smuggling and human trafficking” and “challenges arising from the situation in Afghanistan”.

For the USA, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas attended the high-level meeting. The EU was represented by Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders and Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson, also invited were EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Ilkka Salmi, Europol Executive Director Catherine de Bolle and Eurojust President Ladislav Hamran.

The situation on the Belarusian border with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia was also a topic of the meeting. In their subsequent statement, the US and the EU “condemned in the strongest terms the state-sponsored instrumentalisation and exploitation of migrants”. Joint cooperation should prevent “such phenomena” in the future. To this end, the participants want to “outreach to relevant third countries”. These are not specified, but are likely to be governments such as Iraq, which has been pressured by diplomatic pressure to organise repatriation flights of asylum seekers from Belarus.

Other topics discussed at the EU-US meeting were the implementation of the new, second additional protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, the fight against cybercrime and ransomware, measures against sexual abuse of children, the use of artificial intelligence and the transfer of military “battlefield evidence” to Europol.

Image: Council of Europe.