12 states miss EU screening targets

There are nine days left before the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact stops being a political agreement and becomes law across all 27 member states. On June 12, ten regulations negotiated over years will begin to govern how Europe handles asylum, from the moment a person arrives at an external border to a possible deportation.

The legal architecture is ready. The machinery is not. France has not published the national legislation needed to apply it. Spain will impose much shorter appeal deadlines without a national judicial framework adapted to them. Italy’s implementation plan is still unpublished. Nine member states have not tested the IT systems for Eurodac, the shared biometric database on which the whole scheme relies (ETIAS.com).

Seven-day screening, twelve-week decisions

The Pact is built around speed at the border. Anyone arriving at an EU external frontier must be screened within seven days, including the collection of biometric data from the age of six (European Commission). Applicants from countries where fewer than 20% of asylum claims are successful will go into a fast-track border procedure, with a first decision and appeal completed within 12 weeks. During that time, they are treated in law as not having entered EU territory (CGRS Belgium).

The other major change is mandatory solidarity. Front-line states such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Cyprus can ask for help from other EU countries. Those countries must either relocate asylum seekers, pay roughly €20,000 for each person they refuse to take, or provide staff and equipment. The first solidarity pool covers June to December 2026: 21,000 relocations or €420 million (French Senate). Hungary and Slovakia pledged nothing.

The Commission’s own readiness report, published on May 8, found that only 15 of 27 member states had the screening infrastructure and staff in place (European Commission, ETIAS.com). Free legal aid, required under the Pact, was unavailable in six states, including Greece and Italy, both formally designated as being under acute migratory pressure. The independent mechanism meant to monitor fundamental rights at borders was not operating in Belgium, Hungary, Italy or Malta (European Commission).

Three countries, three legal gaps

France has run into a constitutional and political problem. The government used Article 38, which allows the executive to legislate by decree for a limited period, to rewrite roughly 40% of the immigration code. The left and right objected for different reasons, but both also objected to parliament being bypassed (Le Monde).

No ordinance has been published. The government has suggested it may issue a circular, which is an administrative instruction to officials rather than binding law, to bridge the gap. The Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, has warned of a period of "legal insecurity" as incompatible old and new rules sit beside each other without coherent guidance (Conseil d'État).

Spain faces a different pressure point. On June 1, the state attorney confirmed that appeal deadlines will shrink from two months to as little as five days, without a national law setting out the transition for the courts (EuropaPress).

Poland has secured a concession of its own: a one-year exemption from relocation obligations. Warsaw argued that hosting more than a million Ukrainian refugees and defending the eastern Schengen border amounts to equivalent solidarity. Prime Minister Donald Tusk presented the exemption as settled (VisaHQ). It expires in December.

New return rules pile on

The pressure is not limited to the Pact. On June 1, the European Parliament, the EU’s directly elected legislature, and the Council, which represents member-state governments, reached a provisional deal on the Returns Regulation.

That deal would allow deportation to "return hubs" in third countries with no prior connection to the person being deported. It would also extend administrative detention to 24 months and remove the automatic right to remain while appealing a return decision (European Parliament, Euronews). ECRE, Europe’s largest refugee rights network, called it "one of the most punitive and dangerous migration instruments in recent EU history" (ECRE).

Taken together, the Pact and the Returns Regulation create a migration system organised around speed: seven-day screening, 12-week decisions, compressed appeals and faster deportation. The Commission’s own assessment points to the problem now facing national capitals. By June 12, many still lack the courts, lawyers and border facilities needed to make that system work.