Question 16071 — civil servants and public agents

Summary

Ms. Pascale Martin draws the attention of the Minister of the Interior and Overseas Territories to the working conditions of agents of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), the latter having serious consequences on the agents themselves, which have repercussions on asylum seekers. The staff of this public administrative establishment (EPA) placed with the Ministry of the Interior and Overseas Territories and responsible for implementing constitutional and international obligations regarding the right to asylum, has mobilized four times since October 2023 to defend the quality of the public service provided by the Office. He denounced unrealistic pressure on his work resulting from the activity figures required by the objectives and performance contract which links OFPRA to the ministries of the interior and the budget; pressure relayed by their hierarchy, both in terms of collective and individual objectives. Staff point out the complexity of the procedures for examining requests for international protection, due to constraints relating, in particular, to the detection of profiles presenting a possible security threat on the one hand and a requirement for better consideration of vulnerabilities arising from national and European texts on the other hand. The program budgetary 303 “Immigration and asylum” of the “Immigration, asylum and integration” mission of the latest finance law for 2024 notes that the very high turnover of OFPRA staff, due to this strong work pressure which is also a source of psycho-social risks, is damaging for the very achievement of the set numerical objectives. The MP denounces the consequences of this frantic pace of work imposed on staff, which has direct repercussions on the exercise of the rights of asylum seekers. Indeed, their story, central to their protection, must be heard in the best possible conditions. In addition, since October 2023, the Director General of OFPRA has referred the possible revision of the numerical objectives that OFPRA staff considers unrealistic (such as the rate of 1.7 summons per day in the investigation services), to the negotiations of the objectives and performance contract (COP) for the years 2024-2026 which should, it seems, be concluded in March 2024, between the Office, its ministry and the budget ministry. However, on February 5, 2024, Mediapart revealed the content of an audit report commissioned by the Director General of OFPRA in 2021 from the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation (DITP) with a view to reducing processing times for asylum requests by OFPRA. Three private firms analyzed the working procedures within the Office for an amount of nearly 485,000 euros, as revealed in the report of the Senate commission of inquiry into the growing influence of private consulting firms on public policies and submitted their conclusions to the Director General of OFPRA from April 2022. The conclusions of this report have not been made public, nor even communicated to OFPRA staff by the management of the Office. The MP is surprised that a report financed with public funds is not systematically the subject of a publication of interest to both the agents of the public service concerned and the users, citizens and parliamentarians, guarantors of the control and evaluation of public policies. Besides this, she notes that according to the press article cited, the DITP report mentions that the target of 1.7 interviews per day is “unrealistic” and that it causes “unnecessary pressure” on agents. Furthermore, this same report recommends as a first “priority solution” a reduction in the summons rate to 1.2 asylum application interviews per day, making the drafting of decisions more fluid and ultimately reducing processing times. Also, she asks him if, as part of the development of the OFPRA's 2024-2026 objectives and performance contract (COP), the quantified objectives per staff will be based on a reduction in the target objective of interviews per day, from 1.7 to 1.2, as recommended by the DITP report of April 2022.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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