At its meeting on 25-26 October 2012, the Justice and Home Affairs Council confirmed the agreement reached between the Council and the European Parliament on the recast of the Reception Conditions Directive (containing disposals allowing asylum seekers to access the labour market- see our previous posts- on that topic for more information on the content of article 15 of the Reception Conditions Directive). The adoption of the revised ("second phase") version of the Reception Conditions Directive is expected at the end of the year 2012 according to the deadlines set by the Stockholm Programme, but has not been adopted yet, despite political agreement between the European Parliament and the Member States (in the Justice and Home Affairs Council).
Steeve Peers in its latest State- of play update of the Common European System Statewatch Analysis interestingly mentions:
A previous Statewatch analysis examined the prospects of the EU agreeing on the legislation to establish a second-phase of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) by the end of 2012. To summarise, at time of writing (5 December 2012), with less than four weeks to go to the EU deadline, the EU has already adopted one key measure, the second-phase qualification Directive, back in 2011.
This leaves four legislative proposals outstanding: second-phase legislation concerning reception conditions for asylum-seekers, responsibility for asylum applications, the ‘Eurodac’ system for taking asylum-seekers’ fingerprints, and asylum procedures.
The European Parliament (EP) and the Council agreed deals on the first two of these measures in July 2012, although it took until November 2012 to agree on some technical issues concerning implementation of the legislation on responsibility for asylum applications.However, it is striking that five months after these deals, in particular the agreement on the reception conditions Directive, which did not need to be subject to further negotiations, the Council has not yet taken any further steps towards formal adoption of the legislation concerned. It must be concluded that the Council (in the form of the Presidency and/or the General Secretariat) is either:(a) simply incompetent, or(b) deliberately delaying the formal adoption of these measures, in order to place political pressure on the EP as regards the other proposals – particularly as regards law enforcement authorities’ access to Eurodac, the EU database of asylum-seekers’ fingerprints.
As for the other two measures, the EP has not yet defined its position on Eurodac, as EU political parties are divided on the issue of whether law enforcement authorities should have access to the system. However, the negotiations on the asylum procedures legislation have been ongoing since June.
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