Basic Finns wanted to outsource the asylum search to the government program without success. After that, the matter was brought to the meeting of the big committee, and now it is included in the EU goals.
Prime minister Petteri Orpo (kok) says the government does not promote the “Rwanda model”, i.e. transferring the asylum process to countries outside the EU. According to him, it is a far-reaching model.
Orpo commented on the matter in connection with the EU summit in Brussels.
HS wrote on Wednesdaythat the goal has been included in the policy decided by the government last week, which lists Finland's key goals for influencing the EU's strategic agenda and the Commission's future program.
According to the policy of the Finnish government, “Finland constructively promotes EU-level activities that develop opportunities to implement the asylum process and the provision of international protection in safe third countries”.
According to Orpo the government has not ruled on any Rwanda model, but on the fact that Finland has opportunities and opportunities to participate in the discussion and with the marginal conditions outlined in the government's document.
“The main focus in the European debate is shifting more and more to cooperation with third countries, border security, eradicating human smuggling and an effective return policy. These are the things we talk about here. Also about this cooperation in whether the asylum process could take place somewhere else,” Orpo said.
The boundary conditions mentioned by Orpo are that Finland complies with human rights treaties and other international agreements, the obligations of EU legislation and the rule of law.
The asylum process outsourcing is called the Rwanda model, following Britain's example.
The country has sought cooperation with Rwanda in Africa and wanted to send asylum seekers crossing the English Channel there, whose asylum application Rwanda would meet from start to finish.
The model has attracted interest in EU countries, for example in Denmark and Germany.
Rkp MP Eva Biaudet says that the Basic Finns tried to include the outsourcing of asylum seeking in the Orpo government's program in the spring of 2023, but this was not successful.
However, the line came up again on June 6 at the meeting of the large committee of the parliament, when the committee took a position on the regulation on the management of asylum issues and migration. So it wasn't about the government's strategic EU goals yet, but about formulating Finland's line on the issue of the Council of Ministers.
At that time, the government negotiations were in progress and the country was run by the executive ministry, because a new government had not yet been appointed.
To Biaudet's surprise, the main proposal of the large committee's position read the same sentence that had just been deleted from the government program: “The committee also supports possible EU-level actions aimed at promoting the implementation of the asylum process and international protection in safe third countries”.
Biaut and Sdp Kimmo Kiljunen made a counter proposal, in which the sentence would have been crossed out and stated that the basis of the system should still be the right to apply for asylum in the EU.
Their proposal was defeated by a committee vote of 16–9. The majority were the coalition, Basic Finns, Christian Democrats and the centre.
Biaudet calls the activity “ohari”. In general, it is not customary for political lines to be changed during a ministerial term.
Many Basic Finns have been happy, among other things, in the message service X, that the model is included in the government's EU goals.
Chairman Riikka Purran (ps), new means of immigration policy will emerge and gain support both in Finland and elsewhere in Europe.
Member of Parliament of SDP Titti Tuppurainen wonders in his own writing how the coalition and Rkp “could stoop to this”.
“This is an unusually dark moral shipwreck,” Tuppurainen writes in X.
“Before the concentration camps, the so-called European Jewish question was proposed to be solved by deporting the Jews to Madagascar. It is good to ask how the idea of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda actually sounds. What next? Is this a completely different thing now?”
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