“Shorter deadlines for everything”: Migration Pact takes effect today

Two years after being adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, the Pact on Migration and Asylum is coming into force today. The Pact is a major reform of how European Union member states manage migration, borders and asylum claims.

The Pact is made up of a package of 10 laws and reforms that together create a more unified migration system. In 2024, Belgium voted in favour of all 10 laws in the Pact, together with most member states. Only Hungary and Poland voted against all 10 laws.

The Pact foresees the same asylum procedure in every country, a fairer distribution of reception and responsibility and faster procedures to process asylum claims. “In practice, this means working faster for us – and more work,” says Paulien Blondeel, spokesperson from the Immigration Office, with a laugh. “I can’t deny it’s quite an undertaking. But if every country participates, then after that difficult start-up phase we will end up with an efficiently functioning European system.”

Even after two years of preparation, Belgium is still not ready to implement all 10 legislative acts, nor are any other EU countries. According to analysts, the stress test is whether in the coming weeks and months there will be trust among the member states that each is contributing in the best possible way to building the renewed system.

Hanne Beirens, visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, points out that migrants already in the system will not start from zero. “There is an asylum history, with asylum seekers who arrived in member states earlier, before today, 12 June,” she says. “Those people and their cases still need to be taken into account.”

The Pact includes an agreed-upon list of countries that are considered safe to transfer migrants to and relies on the European Union Agency for Asylum, which collects information about the situation in migrants’ countries of origin. Eurodac, meanwhile, is the EU’s migration and database, which will be an instrumental agency in helping to determine the basis for granting or refusing protection to an asylum seeker.

“Shorter deadlines for everything,” says Blondeel. “And we must extensively register individual data in the central Eurodac database. In this way, the full profile of every asylum seeker and migrant can be consulted and monitored across the entire EU.”

Starting today, new asylum seekers will be given a rapid screening to determine whether they will have access to an accelerated procedure or a regular one. People coming from a country of origin with less than a 20% percent chance of receiving protection will be placed in the accelerated procedure. Within 12 weeks, that asylum seeker must have clarity: protection and the right to stay, or refusal and return.

“In our country, about 40% of asylum seekers would end up in that accelerated procedure,” says Olivier Brasseur of the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons. “It will be a major challenge to make that work.”

One of the most crucial aspects of the pact is the role of Greece, Italy, Spain and Cyprus – the four countries where the most asylum seekers enter the EU outside of recognised systems. These countries remain responsible for everyone entering – carrying out screenings, conducting individual assessments and making decisions about providing asylum or returning the migrant to the country of origin.

In other words, asylum seekers are no longer allowed to travel on to another member state on their own initiative. Not all asylum seekers remain in those countries, however: A distribution agreement sees countries agreeing to accept a certain number of asylum-seekers per year. For Belgium, this is 650 people.

Countries can choose, however, to pay €20,000 per asylum seeker to a European fund to refuse entry, and Belgium has earmarked €13 million for this in 2026, ramping it up to €18 million in 2027.