European House wants just refugee policy

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 29

The European Parliament will take up a joint motion against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) late on Wednesday a day after a briefing was held on Capitol Hill in Washington on the same issue.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have put the joint motion – an amalgamation of five different resolutions filed against CAA – as the last item on the agenda for the day. It states that while the CAA’s stated goal of protecting persecuted groups is welcome, an effective national asylum and refugee policy should be just and holistic in nature and apply to all those in need. In the absence of this vital rider, the CAA is “discriminatory in nature and dangerously divisive”.

Indian diplomats were able to prevail upon a group of extreme right wing MEPs, some of whom were taken for a tour to the Kashmir valley, to withdraw their resolution. However, it was unable to persuade the much wider ideological swathe of MEPs, who instead merged their five resolutions introduced on party lines into one.

India has been extremely critical of the move in Brussels but has been unable to persuade the European Commission or leaders of nation states who have said the resolutions were an independent decision by the MEPs.

A day earlier in Washington, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) asked White House to consider the “use of targeted sanctions against Indian officials primarily responsible for religious freedom violations’’.