Cypriot MEPs vote five-to-one to create common EU list of safe countries to return migrants

Five of Cyprus’ six members of the European parliament on Wednesday night voted to approve a motion empowering the parliament to enter negotiations with the European Council for the creation of a common European Union list of safe countries of origin to which asylum seekers can be returned.

Should the motion become EU policy, countries such as Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as EU candidate countries such as Turkey, will be declared safe across the bloc, with it following that applicants from those countries would be denied political asylum in any EU member state where they may apply.

The motion was put forward by Italian MEP Alessandro Ciriani, who belongs to the Fratelli d’Italia party, which is in the ECR, the same European grouping as Elam, and as such, Elam’s Geadis Geadi was among the five Cypriots to vote in its favour.

He was joined by Loucas Fourlas and Michalis Hadjipantela of Disy, independent Fidias Panayiotou, and Costas Mavrides of Diko.

Mavrides’ vote was a break from the party line of Diko’s European grouping, the centre-left S&D, with only 13 other S&D members voting in favour of the motion and 122 voting against.

The only Cypriot to vote against the motion was Akel’s Giorgos Georgiou.

In total, 396 MEPs voted in favour of the motion, 202 voted against and 56 abstained, with Ciriani saying after the vote that “a common EU list of safe countries of origin allows asylum procedures to be handled more swiftly and consistently, without removing the obligation to assess each case individually”.

“This is about restoring credibility to the asylum system by focusing protection on those who genuinely need it and ensuring faster decisions where the presumption of safety applies,” he said.

However, not everyone in Brussels was convinced, with fellow Italian MEP Cecilia Strada, of the S&D grouping, lambasting Ciriani’s proposal, lamenting that “the far-right agenda has entered the workings of the parliament” and that “most countries considered safe are not so”.

“The compromise texts on safe countries of origin and safe third countries are shameful and hypocritical. Voting for resolutions, condemning violations of human rights and the rule of law in Turkey, Serbia and Tunisia, and then claiming that these countries are safe, is hypocritical,” she said.

The new move for an EU-wide list comes after the Cypriot government had as one of its flagship policies for most of last year a plan to have some regions of Syria declared safe to return migrants.

In line with this policy, Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou had embarked on a tour of Europe to discuss the matter with his counterparts from three other EU member states – Denmark, Greece and Austria, with the Austrian government having told the Cyprus Mail at the time of its own support for the plan.

However, support across the bloc was not unanimous. A spokesperson for Sweden’s EU Affairs minister of the day and incumbent European commissioner for the environment Jessika Roswall denied the claim that they had also supported the plan to the Cyprus Mail, describing it as a “misunderstanding”.

The plan in its entirety was then scuppered by the European Court of Justice in October last year, with the court specifying that the designation of a third country as a safe country of origin must cover the country’s entire territory.