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Europe Approves Rules For Illegal Immigrants

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The Washington Post

Published: June 19, 2008

PARIS - The European Parliament approved new rules Wednesday designed to standardize the dramatic differences in member countries' treatment of illegal immigrants, whose presence is one of the most heated political issues in Europe today.

The measure, which would allow countries to jail illegal immigrants for as long as 18 months pending deportation, was decried by human rights organizations as promoting excessive detention. Supporters defended it as providing greater protections for the foreigners in countries that now permit indefinite detentions and grant detainees few legal rights.

Rapidly changing demographics in Europe - as Muslims arrive from the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europeans move west - has resulted in bitter conflicts between immigrant and nationalist communities. In recent weeks, Romanian immigrants have become a special target of arrest and vigilante violence in Italy.

"The purpose of the legislation is to lay down EU-wide rules and procedure on the return of illegal immigrants," the European Parliament said in a statement issued after Wednesday's vote in Strasbourg, France. "Member states will be banned from applying harsher rules to illegal immigrants, but allowed to keep or adopt more generous rules."

The detention rules relate to people who fail to obey judicial orders to leave the country and are then held for involuntary deportation. Current detention rules range from a maximum of 32 days in France and 20 months in Latvia to indefinite holding in Britain and six other European nations.
Human rights group Amnesty International criticized the policy, saying it does not guarantee that illegal immigrants would be returned to their home countries "in safety and dignity."

"On the contrary, an excessive period of detention of up to 1.5 years, as well as an EU-wide re-entry ban for those forcibly returned, risks lowering existing standards ... and sets an extremely bad example," the organization said in a statement.

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