Court of Auditors: EU migration spending “struggling to demonstrate effectiveness”

March 23, 2016
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The EU’s spending on external migration policy in neighbourhood countries has been scrutinised by the European Court of Auditors (ECA), which published a report on Thursday 17 March 2016 in which it concluded that this spending is “struggling to demonstrate its effectiveness”.
 
The area covered focuses on countries in the Eastern and Southern Neighbourhood, specifically Algeria, Georgia, Libya, Moldova, Morocco and Ukraine. The auditors examined “23 projects altogether, representing a contract value of EUR 89 million out of a total amount of EUR 742 million”. Their main findings “highlight a number of inadequacies affecting the spending” that need to be corrected if financial management is to be improved, the Court suggests.
 
“The EU’s external migration policy covers a wide range of issues such as mobility and legal migration, irregular migration, migration and development or international protection,” the report said.
 
The Court criticises the “complexity of policy objectives and governance, the impossibility of measuring policy results, limited success in returning migrants to their countries of origin and coordination problems between different EU bodies and between the European Commission and the Member States”. Danièle Lamarque, the Member of the European Court of Auditors responsible for the report, noted that “migration represents a fundamental challenge for the European Union”.
 
The Court specified that its report does not concern the current crisis (until 2014) but the lessons learned from the period analysed provide examples of what should no longer be done.
 
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Countries covered:

  • Algeria
  • Egypt
  • Israel
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Morocco
  • Palestine *
  • Syria *
  • Tunisia
Thematics
Migration