Safe countries package

Key points

The EESC:

• welcomes the Commission’s efforts to standardise the procedures for designating safe countries, which are currently decided at the discretion of the individual Member States, with an absence of transparency and a lack of effective supranational oversight;
• emphasises that the designation of a country as ‘safe’ plays a pivotal role in the procedures for examining asylum applications, given that applications from citizens coming from countries considered to be safe are examined under an accelerated procedure;
• points out that the use of the accelerated procedure for the examination of an asylum application means that the procedural safeguards are diminished and that, if the application is rejected, the applicant may be removed from the territory of the Member State pending a court appeal, a situation which is blatantly at odds with the principle of non-refoulement under Article 33 of the Geneva Convention;
• considers that the designation of safe countries also constitutes a restriction of the right to asylum, both because procedural safeguards are diminished due to the use of the accelerated procedure and because the presumption that the country is safe results in a reversal of the burden of proof onto the asylum seeker, who must prove the contrary in order to be granted international protection;
• believes that the recognition rate of 20% at EU level established as a criterion for the application of the accelerated procedure and the border procedure is arbitrary and inadequate;
• argues that, on the basis of the data currently available from both institutional and civil society sources and in accordance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, the main consequence of designating the countries listed in Annex II to COM(2025) 186 as safe (Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco, Tunisia) could be to deny the right to asylum to applicants from those countries.