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If it is to be effective in responding to security challenges and managing migration flows, the EU needs to work with countries outside the EU. This need only grows as the world becomes more interconnected. Thus, the EU is making Home Affairs a central priority in its external relations, ensuring a coordinated and coherent approach through its Strategy for the External Dimension of Justice, Freedom and Security. Partnership with non-EU countries on these issues also aims to strengthen the rule of law and promote respect for human rights and international obligations.
Thematic priorities
EU external action on Home Affairs focuses on:
- Migration and asylum: with a view to increasing EU dialogue and cooperation with countries of origin and transit in order to manage migration flows more effectively, the EU's Global Approach to Migration provides a strategic framework for the external dimension of migration. It is built around three pillars, namely improving the organisation of legal migration and mobility, preventing and curbing irregular migration and strengthening synergies between migration and development. The protection of asylum-seekers and refugees is also a central element of the global approach to migration.
- Security: the EU engages with non-EU countries to combat serious organised crime, drugs and trafficking in human beings. It does this, inter alia, by focusing the EU's counter-terrorism activities primarily on prevention and on the protection of critical infrastructures, as well as, by ensuring that there is coherence and complementarity between the internal and external aspects of EU security policies.
Having an effective strategy for the external dimension of Home Affairs contributes to the further development of the EU’s internal area of freedom, security and justice. It also supports EU political objectives abroad by fostering the rule of law, democracy, respect for human rights and good governance in non-EU countries.
Geographic priorities
- Enlargement and Western Balkans: helping acceding and candidate countries adjust to the EU acquis and contributing to stability in the Western Balkan region.
- The EU’s neighbours: implementing the freedom, security and justice component of the European Neighbourhood Policy.
- Strategic Partners (USA, Canada, Russia, Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Mexico): maintaining the transatlantic dialogue with the United States and Canada and implementing the Common Space on Freedom, Security and Justice with Russia.
- Other partners: helping strengthen the rule of law and judiciary, as well as cooperation to prevent illegal activities within the framework of Partnership and Cooperation Agreements.
- Particular importance is attached to developing cooperation with international organisations, especially the United Nations.
Targeted tools
The EU uses a number of different instruments to implement the external aspect of its Home Affairs policy. These include: legal agreements, declarations, action plans and agendas, expert and ministerial meetings, sub-committees, monitoring and evaluation, and, naturally, assistance programmes.
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