The recently approved Migration Pact is written in naive language and comes from a time when it was repeated that the wave of migrants heading to Europe were people fleeing war and oppression. It looks as if it was written by a union organization of migrants.
On Monday, 164 states approved the "non-binding" world pact on migration in Morocco, but several dozen of them refused to do so. European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopulos said they probably did not study the pact sufficiently. But the countries that rejected it probably had studied the text thoroughly.
Specifically, the pact puts economic migrants on the same level as political asylum seekers and refugees from wars. Whoever escapes from a war or gas chamber is considered the same as a man who "flees" to Europe because he dreams of playing football for Paris Saint-Germain.
As a result, the pact blurs the line between illegal and legal migration. The term illegal migrant is not at all in the text.
This is a consequence of a time when the treaty originated as a response to the refugee wave in 2015, when more than a million people arrived in Europe, and when it was politically correct only to see them as refugees in need. The pact is based on the long-term idea that migration from overcrowded and poor developing countries is a natural solution to the aging and waning. It does not, however, preserve the right of the countries to decide who they want to accept and whether they want someone at all.
But the most interesting is the paragraph that aims to calm down the public opinion in favor of migration by committing governments to prosecute "hate speech" and improving public debate by supporting and educating the media, investing in the improvement of ethical reporting standards and advertising, and "stopping allocation of public funding or material support to media outlets that systematically promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination towards migrants".
The overall impression of the pact is that migration is a positive phenomenon that needs to be governed and supported. The obligations are almost exclusively intended for the recipient countries, while migrants and their home countries are almost not mentioned.
The pact was labeled as generally acceptable in the campaign during the weeks ahead of the summit in Marrakech because it is non-binding. However, there were logical objections to why it was created and why so much time, money and political capital was invested in it if the signatories did not have to follow it.
The pact´s supporters had to say that, as such, it is not legally binding, but it is politically binding for the signatory states meaning they have to behave according to the text. Also, there are some "non-binding commitments" that will need to be addressed through regulations and laws.