On an Italian dock, the EU’s new asylum pact gives rescued migrants a rushed ‘tick-box’ border screening

The survivors of a recent maritime migrant rescue operation carried out by the German NGO SOS Humanity were screened on the port docks as they first set foot on EU soil, revealing the insensitive efficiency at the centre of the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum. The reception policies from the pact, implemented in June 2026, require an initial screening of new EU arrivals to last a maximum of seven days. The 28 survivors rescued from an overcrowded dinghy on a stormy night in the central Mediterranean were disembarked at 11 am on Saturday (31 October), and had finished being processed by the evening. Under the new pact, that means their asylum decision will have been most likely conducted then and there. The platform alongside the Humanity 1 vessel was bustling with hazmat suits and police. In the northern Italian port of Livorno, a makeshift processing centre was set up to host the Red Cross’s health scan, the EU agency for asylum’s vulnerability scan and legal information session, as well as the police’s interrogation – all to be carried out within hours of migrants’ stunned arrival. “Immediately after a rescue, when people only need to rest, they sit through a compressed screening for authorities to rush through a tick-boxing exercise,” said Marta [the NGO requests only first names are used by journalists], SOS Humanity’s protection officer, as survivors from the ship’s rescue were being disembarked by authorities. She had prepared vulnerability certificates for those most in need, in the hope their case be treated with more care. Marta disembarked survivors from the Humanity 1 straight into the makeshift screening setup on the port's quay on Saturday (Source: Gaia Neiman, EUobserver) “Some border interrogations can become violent, a person has just disembarked and they are suddenly facing hours of interrogations,” Marta told EUobserver. She has often seen armed Frontex or Europol officers standing along the ship at port, towering over migrants in their most vulnerable hours. The new pact on migration foresees police registration into Eurodac, a database set up to share information with other member states, followed by an immediate decision as to whether a newcomer should qualify for an accelerated asylum procedure. That means those from nationalities less likely to be granted asylum would receive an answer within 12 weeks, and are most probably going to be rejected. “There’s no way you can do an accurate screening of all the traumas someone on this journey has lived in 10 minutes with a police officer,” she added.