UNHCR Observations on the Council Decision Creating a European Refugee Fund
- Author: RO Brussels
- Document source:
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Date:
October 2000
General
1. The Commission proposal for a legal base to establish a European Refugee Fund was adopted at the Justice and Home Affairs Council in Brussels on 28 September 2000. It regroups existing budget lines related to the reception of asylum-seekers, integration of refugees and voluntary return of temporary protected persons into one financial instrument. The Fund makes available a total amount of 216 Million Euro over five years. Of this, 36 Million Euro will be spent from budgetary year 2000. Each consecutive year, 45 Million Euro will be available.
UNHCR is pleased to see that most of its key concerns, which follow hereafter, have been addressed in the text of the legal base as finally adopted.
2. The creation of the Fund allows for greater coherence in implementing Community policy in the areas eligible for funding, as well as increased predictability and flexibility in allocating resources. The instrument covers the entire five year period in which the key elements of a common asylum system will be codified in Community legislative instruments in accordance with the provisions of Article 63 of the Treaty on European Union. The Fund should enable Member States to redress imbalances between their efforts in receiving and integrating persons in need of protection, provided the allocation of funds duly takes into account the various factors which have resulted in the uneven distribution of populations of asylum-seekers, refugees and temporary protected persons in the Union.
3. UNHCR expects the Fund to ensure continuity in Community funding of refugee projects and prevent disruption of a large number of national and European projects for which the Community budget has been the unique source of funding so far. It is hoped that a number of UNHCR's implementing partners will benefit by financial support from the Fund which provides a potentially valuable source of co-funding for UNHCR sponsored programmes.
Emergency situations
4. UNHCR welcomes the establishment of emergency procedures and specific budgetary arrangements addressing situations of sudden mass influx in EU Member States (Article 6). Such situations call, indeed, for specific measures and separate budgetary arrangements in order to ensure that regular, long-term actions do not suffer as a result of diversion of resources to confront emergency situations.
Allocation criteria
5. As for the distribution of resources (Article 10), UNHCR is pleased to see that the Fund provides for granting each Member State a fixed amount of the annual allocation of the Fund. This allows additional support for those Member States which experience difficulty in developing their asylum systems, with the remainder of the available funds allocated according to numbers of applicants and accepted cases. Thus, the level of development of the asylum system is included as an additional criterion for allocating funds to Member States. The allocation criteria that were initially proposed – the average numbers of asylum applicants and recognised refugees during a fixed period, as well as the quality of the proposed project – would, in the view of UNHCR, not have been sufficient to address problems of very uneven capacity which militate against effective burden-sharing. .
Tasks and activities
6. As regards eligible tasks and activities (Article 4), UNHCR is pleased to see that the provision of legal assistance, as well as measures to taken into account special needs of vulnerable persons, have been included among activities aimed at improving reception conditions for asylum-seekers and temporary admitted persons. In UNHCR's experience, past Community funding in this particular area has given added impetus to Member States' efforts to develop their asylum systems.
Management structure
7. UNHCR appreciates the preferred option for decentralising the management of the Fund (Article 7), on the assumption that the proper identification of high-quality projects and the selection, administering, monitoring and control of implementation of projects and actions can best be done at the national level. UNHCR has proposed that its local Branch Offices, in addition to other relevant actors such as regional or local public authorities, government agencies, social partners, and non-governmental organisations, are closely associated with the work of any authority or committee set up to manage funds at national level. Such involvement, as a minimum, should include consultations regarding the selection, monitoring and evaluation of projects. In order to guarantee objectivity and impartiality of decision-taking, agencies or organisations represented in any structure or body responsible for the management of the funds should not have any voting rights in regard to project proposals submitted by themselves, or their member agencies, in response to a call for proposals.
Public awareness and networking
8. UNHCR calls on the Commission and Member States also to utilise the Fund for implementing public information and awareness measures related to States' policies and practices concerning refugees, asylum-seekers and temporary protected persons. UNHCR has benefited from Community funding to promote public awareness for the integration of refugees in the past, and the positive results of such activity would argue for continuation of such a facility, to be made available to any competent actor. While no longer included in the provisions of the final version of the legal base, as adopted in Council, UNHCR hopes that such activities can be included among the eligible Community-wide actions administered by the European Commission (Article 5). As for the latter, sufficient funding should also be released to maintain and strengthen existing networks established for the exchange of policies and practices, training and cooperation, and which so far have benefited from Community funding.
UNHCR Brussels
October 2000
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