Brussels, 12/12/2011 (Agence Europe) - The justice and home affairs ministers of the 27 countries of the EU will be meeting in Brussels on Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 December for a session with a particularly packed agenda. The future of the Schengen zone and the passenger name record agreements (PNR) with the United States are the dossiers expected to dominate the work of the home affairs ministers on Tuesday, whilst the justice ministers will seek to reach agreement on the proposal regarding victims' rights and European investigation orders.
The management of the Schengen free-movement area, a source of controversy since the beginning of 2011 and the arrival of large waves of migrants on European shores in the wake of the “Arab Spring”, has been the subject of a series of proposed amendments by the European Commission in recent months. By request of the Council, it placed a number of texts on the table on 16 December, namely a proposal to reinforce the Schengen evaluation system and an amendment to the Schengen border code, to allow a member state to bring back controls on its internal borders as a last resort, in the event of unexpected migratory pressure.
These two texts will be the subject of a discussion on Tuesday, but no decision is anticipated. For the member states, it will mainly be a matter of getting across their differences in approach with the Commission and their problems with a number of aspects of its proposals, particularly on the Schengen border code, whereby the Commission intends to make a decision at its own level on bringing back internal controls once these have been decided upon by a given member state. The Commission sees this as a somewhat logical “communitisation” of the decision and wishes to protect itself against unilateral decisions such as the Danish and, more recently, Dutch plans of this year, but this has not come over well to a number of countries, starting with France or Germany. Another point of discussion will be the legal basis selected by the Commission to reinforce the Schengen evaluation system. The member states would like to use Article 77 of the Treaty plus a consultation of the Parliament rather than Article 70 and co-decision.
Still on Schengen, it was by no means certain on Monday 12 December whether the home affairs ministers would be discussing the issue of Bulgaria and Romania's accession to the free-movement area. The Dutch “no”, which was firmly repeated on Friday 9 December at the European Council, leaves little margin for a positive outcome at this JHA Council. A meeting of the permanent representatives on Monday afternoon was still trying to encourage the Netherlands to move on this issue, but “without much optimism”, stated one source.
The other major dossier on the table of the home affairs ministers will be that of the PNR agreement with the United States. The EU27 are expected to accept the text as negotiated with the United States and sign it this week, before sending it to the European Parliament for its approval. On this dossier, Germany, which traditionally has a cautious approach to the protection of personal data, is expected to abstain, possibly joined by other countries. It is worth noting that only a qualified majority is required on this dossier. Other subjects for Tuesday include a stock-take of negotiations on the common asylum regime, particularly the revision of the Dublin regulation and the introduction of an early warning mechanism (the idea of a mechanism to suspend transfers of asylum seekers between countries having been definitively shelved).
As regards the justice part, on Wednesday 14 December, the agenda is also a heavy one: the ministers are to adopt a general approach to the directive on minimum rights for victims of crime in the EU (they were already able to draw up the outlines of this approach on 27 October in Luxembourg, with emphasis on the link between rights and the specific role of the victim in proceedings), on European investigation orders and the regulation on cross-border inheritance. They will take stock of two other somewhat sensitive dossiers: the proposal for a common European sales law/European contract law, which many member states have criticised, and the highly controversial proposal on the right of access to a lawyer from the beginning of custody. (SP/transl.fl)