This month EU lawmakers voted to allow undocumented migrants to be held in detention centers for up to 18 months and banned from European Union territory for five years.
Manfred Weber, the German center-right legislator from Bavaria who shepherded the measure through Parliament, said that it provided minimum common standards for the treatment of migrants throughout the European Union while still showing citizens it was tough on illegality.
One opponent of the measure, Cimade — the only French nongovernmental organization authorized to work in France’s 23 detention centers — released a statement saying that it deplored the passage of what civil liberties groups have called “the directive of shame,” and said it was weighing contesting it before the European Court of Justice or the Eruorpean Court of Human Rights.
Amnesty International said it was “deeply disappointed” by the outcome of the vote, and appealed to member states currently applying higher standards not to use the directive as a pretext for lowering them.
The European Union has 224 detention centers for migrants, with capacity for 30,871 people. National regulations on how long migrants can be confined vary; in France, it is 32 days; in Germany, 18 months. Eight European Union countries have no time limit. European legislators visiting Denmark in April said they were concerned about some detainees who had been held for eight years.
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