The European Parliament today backed the creation of a European Border and Coast Guard.

The S&D Group rapporteur, Peter Niedermüller, said:

“This is a positive step forward, this new Agency will be better placed to help Member States ensure more effective management of the EU’s external borders. This is essential if we want to get to grips with the ongoing refugee and migration crisis and want the Schengen area to work effectively. The S&D Group have managed to ensure that the new agency has a specific mandate for supporting search and rescue operations. This will help to prevent many more needless deaths in Europe’s seas.”
“We also managed to ensure that the new Agency will not be involved in returning people from third countries, as was proposed by the Commission and the Council. We do not believe that this is a role that should be assigned to a Home Affairs Agency. We need to instead set a gold standard to ensure that return operations respect the fundamental rights of those being returned and that they are dealt with in a humane way. We opposed any attempt to create a lowest common denominator approach on returns.”