European Commission rejects initiative to ban migration from 'non-Western origins'

The European Commission has rejected a citizen's initiative that called for a moratorium on migration from "non-Western origins." The initiative, launched by Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Austrian activist Martin Sellner, sought to halt new non-European immigration channels. This included suspending asylum applications for economic migrants and those from safe countries, stopping new student and family reunification visas for non-Europeans, and strictly limiting legal migration until social cohesion and cultural continuity in member states could be restored.

Proponents of the initiative argued that decades of legal and illegal migration have harmed social cohesion, public services, security, and the ethnic and cultural continuity of European peoples. They claimed this has led to parallel societies, increased crime, and the marginalization of indigenous populations, posing a risk of native Europeans becoming minorities in their own countries without radical changes to asylum and migration systems.

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the criteria on which the proposed moratorium would be based would constitute discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnic origin.

However, the European Commission determined that the proposed moratorium's criteria would constitute discrimination based on race and ethnic origin. The Commission stated that the initiative directly contradicts the EU's core values, as outlined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Consequently, the initiative could not be registered.

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the initiative is clearly contrary to the values of the Union established in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, in Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as to established case law, which is why it cannot be registered.