As countries are starting to roll out their COVID-19 vaccination strategies, PICUM has been monitoring European national policies concerning undocumented migrants. Based on media reports, official sources and information we received from our members and social media followers, we have started to compile a map displaying the countries that explicitly include undocumented people in their COVID-19 vaccination strategy and those who explicitly exclude them.

Undocumented migrants are explicitly mentioned as a target group for vaccination in the Dutch and Spanish vaccination strategies. The UK government has published guidance according to which no fees and no immigration checks would apply to people accessing the COVID-19 vaccines. In France, a December 2020 decree made the vaccines available for free for every person living in the country, without the need of presenting a health insurance card. The Italian Medication Agency published an FAQ where it states that the vaccines will be available for anyone living in Italy, regardless of their residence status. The Belgian and Irish Health Ministers also reported to their national parliaments that the vaccination strategy would include undocumented migrants.

While these are all welcome developments, practical challenges remain. The UN Migration Network calls on States to guarantee effective access to the COVID-19 vaccines to all migrants, and reports that only 25% of national vaccination plans submitted to the COVAX Facility include migrants.

Follow us on Twitter @PICUM_post to know more as we keep updating the map and sharing more information about the national contexts.

Front-LEX and the Legal Centre Lesvos sent a Communication to the Executive Director of Frontex on 15 February, requesting the agency to immediately suspend or terminate operations in the Aegean in view of serious and persistent human rights violations. The European Border and Coast Guard Regulation states that the Executive Director is obliged to withdraw the “financing for any activity by the Agency, or suspend or terminate any activity by the Agency [...] if he or she considers that there are violations of fundamental rights”. According to Article 265 of the EU treaty, Frontex has to define its position within two months. If it fails to do so, a legality review action may be brought before the EU Court of Justice.

After visiting the EU institutions in January, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier De Schutter called on the EU countries to prioritise the fight against poverty, after the EU failed to lift 20 million people out of poverty by 2020. He also called on the EU to adopt a framework directive setting common standards on minimum income schemes, and recommended that they should cover undocumented migrants too.

In her statement before the Human Rights Council on 26 February, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called EU leaders to protect human rights defenders, especially those defending migrants’ rights. The Commissioner cited several cases of criminalisation of NGOs protecting migrants’ rights in the EU, including at least 50 criminal or administrative proceedings in Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain since 2016, as well as rising criminalisation of border monitoring and provision of assistance in Hungary. In Croatia, the authorities blocked Members of the European Parliament from visiting border areas with Bosnia, amid credible allegations of human rights violations.

After more than three years of investigation, the prosecutor of Trapani (Sicily) officially pressed charges against 21 individuals and 3 organisations of aiding and abetting “illegal immigration”, in relation to operations conducted between 2016 and 2017. Among them are crew members of the Iuventa ship, who risk up to 20 years in jail.

National Red Cross Societies in the EU have called on EU institutions and Member States to promote and defend the space for civil society to ensure human rights of all migrants, including those in an irregular situation. The paper highlights how the focus on countering irregular migration and migrant smuggling, together with the prioritisation of migration management objectives in the EU external cooperation, jeopardise the work of humanitarian actors across the EU. The Red Cross societies further underline the inadequacy of the Guidelines published by the European Commission in 2020, which could result in further limitations to humanitarian assistance in the EU, by allowing the criminalisation of activities such as providing food, shelter, transport and information. Similar concerns apply with regard to the Commission recommendation on search and rescue, which imposes several obligations on search and rescue NGOs.

On 10 February, the European Parliament published a report on EU asylum border procedures which finds that they lead to de facto detention, without a necessity test, judicial review nor application of alternatives to detention. It also underlines numerous reports about persons being refused entry or pushed back in the context of border procedures, without any assessment of their protection needs, nor registration of their asylum claims. Procedures to identify people in situations of vulnerability are also missing. The report recommends exempting children and families from border procedures, and calls Member States to refrain from applying them overall (and also says that in no case should member states be obliged to apply them).

On 16 February, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK had violated the Convention’s prohibition against forced labour (Art. 4) by prosecuting two children for drug-related offences, despite evidence they were victims of trafficking. While the Court found that international law does not bar states from prosecuting victims per se, doing so risked contradicting their duty to protect victims of trafficking and facilitate their recovery. According to the Court, any decision to prosecute them should take into account an independent trafficking assessment.

The EU’s fundamental rights agency published an EU-wide report on crime victimisation, based on a survey of 35,000 people. It found that non-EU citizens were among those who reported experiencing higher rates of harassment. In addition, people from an ethnic minority were among those who experience physical violence at a higher rate. While people often do not report their victimisation to the police, incidents are reported at a higher rate if the victim perceives the perpetrator to have an ethnic minority or immigrant background.

The Canadian government launched a Gender and Migration Hub to provide concrete guidance and resources on how to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender-responsive migration policies and practices. The hub was developed in cooperation with the Women in Migration Network (WIMN), which also recently published a global mapping of organisations working with and for migrant women.