On June 12, 2026, the application of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, known as PEMA, began. Official rhetoric in the days ahead will stress its guaranteeing character and its respect for the rights of migrants and international protection seekers. But we must challenge this claim, because, although the PEMA contains relevant guarantees, such as those concerning international protection for women who are victims of violence — art. 9.2.f of Regulation 2024/1347 — or for people persecuted for belonging to the LGBTQ+ community — art. 10.1 of the same Regulation —, the truth is that it was not conceived to better protect human rights, but to manage migratory flows more effectively from a security-oriented logic.
The logic does not erase the differences between the actors who negotiated it, nor the relevant role of the Spanish Government, which was presented as a counterweight to the tougher positions and, in fact, the final text — nine regulations and one directive, published on May 22, 2024 — is the result of complex compromises. But underlying it all is the premise that border control is a legitimate end capable of justifying rights restrictions that would be difficult to accept in other contexts. The Chișinău Declaration, adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe at its 135th Ministerial Session, reflects that same tension.
“Underlying is the premise that border control is a legitimate end capable of justifying rights restrictions that would be difficult to accept in other contexts”
A promising starting point for understanding what the PEMA entails could be the maxim of divide et impera. There are many normative pieces, the system presents itself in a fragmented way and, moreover, it does not regulate the entire migratory phenomenon, because it does not address visa policy nor the return or expulsion in a broad sense, which will require the approval of new regulations. Its main object is the European common asylum system, although in practice it designs a model for classifying those who arrive at European borders without prior authorization that determines how the entire entry and reception model operates. Understanding its architecture matters, because its effects are not in a single norm, but in the articulation among them and in the gaps they leave behind.
To try to explain it simply, the PEMA does not operate as a single norm, but as a sequence. At the external border, Regulation 2024/1356 on Triage acts first, ordering identification, security checks, the initial vulnerability assessment, and data collection. It is the rule that establishes the mechanism for selecting or separating asylum seekers from those who may receive international protection and the rest, that is, those who are “only” economic migrants. In parallel, Regulation Eurodac 2024/1358 is activated, reinforced by Regulation 2024/1352 on Interoperability, to record and cross biometric information. Next, the Regulation on the Management of Asylum and Migration 2024/1351 determines which Member State should take charge of the application and how the solidarity mechanism operates among the different States, so that there is a “fair” distribution of the burdens related to migratory management. If the person seeks international protection, Regulation 2024/1348 on Procedure decides by which channel the process will be carried out — ordinary, accelerated, or frontier — while the Reception Conditions Directive 2024/1346 fixes the material conditions of assistance during the procedure.
The substantive basis of the decision is provided by Regulation 2024/1347 on Qualification, which defines who can be recognized as a refugee or a beneficiary of subsidiary protection. If the request is rejected at the border, the Frontier Return Regulation 2024/1349 comes into play. And in exceptional crisis situations—force majeure or instrumentalization—Regulation 2024/1359 allows altering deadlines, procedures, and rules of solidarity. Outside this border itinerary, Regulation 2024/1350 on Resettlement regulates admission from third countries through legal and humanitarian channels. To this entire complex system adds the Return Regulation project [2025/0059 (COD)], whose approval procedure is currently in first-reading review before the European Parliament, and which concerns the generic system for expelling people in irregular situations.
“All of this regulatory framework introduces a securitarian logic, protecting the territory against the foreign individual, about which there is default distrust”
All of this regulatory framework—both the existing provisions and the future ones—introduces a securitarian logic, of protecting the territory against the foreign person, about which there is default distrust, even more intensely. This did not necessarily oblige the drafting of a new state asylum or immigration law, but it did make it advisable to adjust the Spanish ordering. A system that, particularly in asylum matters, will be clearly displaced. The omission can be explained by parliamentary fragmentation and the difficulty of undertaking any legislative reform, but it is not neutral. Conflicts will arise at the border, in police stations, in reception centers, before the administration and before the courts, and that will generate evident litigation.
And it will do so from the very moment of its entry into force. The PEMA turns the border into a space of intensive legal classification and, from that classification, the frontier procedure can be activated, based on the fiction of non-entry, so that people under effective state control can be treated as if they had not legally accessed the territory, opening the door to reductions in guarantees, to the adoption of summary decisions or, on the contrary, to keeping the person for weeks in a state of administrative availability. But this initial friction point will not be the only one: Eurodac allows the mandatory collection of biometric data from age six and permits a proportionate level of coercion; the frontier procedure can reach unaccompanied minors in certain circumstances; age determination carries risks if there is no effective presumption of minority; the family unit is weakly protected, with impact on older siblings or other adult figures; child detention is allowed as an exception, but can be expanded under the pretext of the best interests of the child; or the overload of legal representatives threatens the real effectiveness of guarantees.
“People under effective state control can be treated as if they had not legally entered the territory”
In this scenario, immigration lawyers and Spanish judges will have to activate dialogue strategies with the CJEU through the prejudicial question. That dialogue will be particularly complex when the conflicts do not confine themselves to the relationship between European regulations and national laws, but affect rights protected by the Constitution, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the ECHR, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the Istanbul Convention. The PEMA will not only transform the asylum system. It will also alter the relationship between Union Law and domestic Law and perhaps, although we are not yet able to calibrate it appropriately, interstate cooperation within the EU.
