Almost a decade of negotiations on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum came to an end in May 2024. Statements such as “it is perhaps one of the most important decisions in this legislative period, and it is certainly one of the most difficult for many” and “Today is a truly historic day, as we have delivered on the Migration and Asylum Pact, possibly the most important legislative package of this mandate” illustrate how much political weight was placed on the New Pact. As the Pact moves from negotiation to implementation, one question stands out: What impact will a negotiation process that was both lengthy and finalized under enormous time pressure have on implementation?

To understand the interplay of the Pact’s negotiations and implementation, a look back on how the process evolved over the past decade is essential. The first proposals were presented in 2015 in “A European Agenda on Migration”. However, no agreement was reached during the term of the Jucker Commission (2014-2019), due to persistent differences between member states. Upon entry into office, Ursula von der Leyen made a New Pact on Migration and Asylum one of her priorities. To underline its importance she included it in her political guidelines and in the mission letter to Commissioner Ylva Johansson and Vice-President Margaritis Schinas. Although this initiative was more a reformulation of the Agenda on Migration than a completely new Pact, it was ultimately successfully negotiated under the first von der Leyen Commission.

The successful conclusion of the negotiations was presented by the Commission as an important and just-in-time success. But what will the Pact change? Simplified and accelerated procedures will be mandatory in a broad variety of cases, introducing new grounds for detention. Intensified partnerships with third countries constitute an essential part of a reinforced external dimension. Lastly, instead of a binding solidarity mechanism, the Pact applies “flexible solidarity”, giving the member states the opportunity to choose their contribution à la carte.

Political negotiations under time pressure

Upon her election as Commission President in 2019 Ursula von der Leyen made securing an agreement on the New Pact within her term of office one of her top priorities. However, in September 2021, she admitted that “progress has been painfully slow” and urged the co-legislators to “speed up the process”. One instrument adopted to address this concern was an inter-institutional agreement setting out a joint roadmap, signed by the European Parliament and the rotating Presidencies of the Council of the EU (France, Czechia, Sweden, Spain and Belgium) in September 2022. This roadmap set a clear deadline: “Conclusion of the whole Pact by the end of this parliamentary term.”

But even with the new 2020 proposals and a joint roadmap in place, member states remained deeply divided. Some pushed for a mandatory relocation mechanism, while others wanted to limit secondary movements; this conflict continued to be a key point of contention. The differing priorities of member states, combined with the preference of some governments to pursue decisions by consensus, even where qualified majority voting applied, are among the main reasons that delayed the process. Following the roadmap, inter-institutional negotiations were supposed to begin by the end of 2022. However this timeline could not be met, as the Council only reached agreement on several key elements in June 2023. 

The Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation exemplifies inter-institutional negotiations under time pressure. In September 2023, the EP announced that further interinstitutional negotiations would be put on hold. The reason: although close to the targeted end of the negotiations, the member states – again – had not yet taken a position on this controversial piece of legislation. Indeed, the Council only agreed to a negotiating mandate for the Regulation on 4 October 2023. Given that the declared aim was to conclude negotiations before the end of the year, this left little time to bridge institutional differences and finalise such a complex legislative package.

Despite these constraints, on 20 December 2023, the Council announced that a deal had been found on the core political elements of the Pact. After years of protracted discussions, political agreement was finally reached, although many of the technical aspects still required further work. Officially, the EP approved the final package of legislative acts on 10 April 2024 and the Council on 14 May. A four-month period to develop the core political principles into technically mature legislative acts seems to be rather short. Considering that the Pact includes ten legislative texts that are interconnected and supposed to form a common framework without internal contradictions, this appears to be a mammoth task. By shifting the negotiations away from the technical level, the political symbolic value of reaching an agreement came to outweigh considerations of legal and practical feasibility.

Implementation at the technical level

While negotiations on the Pact took place at the political level between member states, the process of implementation takes place at the technical level. At the EU level, this process is steered by the Commission, which kicked the process off in June 2024 with the release of the Common Implementation Plan (CIP). As with the negotiations, there is an implementation deadline: the CIP specifies what steps need to be taken to ensure that the instruments of the Pact are operational by June 2026.

The process had a rocky start: the first major milestone in the implementation of the Pact was the submission of the National Implementation Plans (NIPs) by the member states in December 2024. In these plans, member states must outline how they want  to apply the changes that the Pact necessitates. Although the CIP was published in June rather than September so that “Member States have the maximum time to prepare their National Implementation Plans (…)”, half of the member states missed the first deadline. By June 2025, 25 member states had submitted their NIP.

Besides the rocky start, the implementation process is also complicated by technical problems in the legislation. The political agreement on the Pact promised simplified asylum procedures. However, legal analysis of the provisions of the new Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR) shows that the new rules lead to “considerable complexity”. This is because the new legislation expands the (mandatory) use of special procedures, creating distinctions between groups of migrants. When the APR was first proposed in 2021, NGO umbrella organisation ECRE warned of a “procedural labyrinth”. At the same time, the APR mandates that the asylum border procedure should take no more than 6 months in the regular procedure. The implementation demands far-reaching operational changes to the asylum systems of member states, which were not a focus of the negotiation process.

It is now up to the technical level to ensure that this “procedural labyrinth” is implemented in the member states. To do so, the Commission has created dedicated country teams for each member state and organises meetings of expert groups, attended by representatives of the Commission and member states. According to the CIP, these meetings aim to facilitate discussion and the exchange of information and best practices, and issue guidance. The legal experts of the Commission clarify for member states how provisions must be interpreted. Additionally, the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) is involved in the issuing of guidance and training for those working on the ground in member states’ asylum systems. By June 2026, the implementation of the APR and other instruments of the Pact should have led to “convergence in the assessment and decision-making process of individual asylum applications across Europe (…)”.

What’s next?

We have described a sharp contrast between the political and contested nature of the Pact negotiations, and the technical nature and challenges of its implementation. Even after adoption, this contrast remains: as is stated in the Commission’s State of play on the implementation of the Pact on Migration and Asylum from June 2025, “while progress is being made at the technical level, sustained political engagement and ownership at national level remain essential to address the identified challenges effectively”.

Here lies the main challenge of the implementation of the Pact: while steps are being taken at the technical level, the support for a European approach to migration and asylum policy at the level of national governments is wavering as political discourse on migration moves further to the right. Although we cannot predict the future, recent events such as the (planned) border closures in Germany and the Netherlands have shown that rather than a “coordinated response”, member states favour unilateral, restrictive actions that only serve to further harden Europe’s treatment of vulnerable migrants and weaken free movement in the Schengen Area.

The instruments of the Pact should be operational by June 2026, meaning that the implementation process is over halfway. It is unclear what EU member states’ asylum systems will look like at that time, but the chances of “convergence” are unlikely. For that, implementation is too challenging and cooperation too politically contested.

Nicola Diedrich is a PhD candidate at the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences, specializing in the Centre’s branch on European Integration. Her research focuses on negotiation dynamics within the EU from a micropolitical perspective.

Puck Overhaart is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Public Administration at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focus is on the enforcement of EU migration law.

The authors are responsible for the content of the blogposts.

This blog post is based on the outcomes of the SCEUS Summer school on European Union migration policies, which took place in Salzburg, 7-11 July 2025, as part of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539.