Brussels, 08/07/2015(Agence Europe) - EU Home Secretaries will be meeting for an informal meeting on Thursday 9 July in Luxembourg but will they succeed in moving closer to the objectives set out by the European Commission and endorsed by the European Council on 25 June, to distribute between themselves around 40,000 asylum seekers by the end of July?
This question will be at the heart of their discussion on Thursday afternoon. The Luxembourg Presidency intends to move forward as quickly as possible on this measure, which seeks to take the pressure off Italy and Greece by taking in 24,000 and 16,000 people respectively over a two-year period. The Presidency also wants a decision adopted at the Council in this connection before 31 July. On Wednesday, however, it was still not at all certain that the member states would provide clear figures for the contributions they intended to make by 9 July.
This dossier is highly sensitive and this emergency mechanism consists of activating Article 78-3 of the Treaty of the EU, as proposed by the European Commission on 27 May. It has been discussed very “discreetly” by member states but at this stage, no national figures have been proposed on paper, according to information from one source. On Wednesday 8 July, no one was prepared to say whether this threshold of 40,000 people would be achieved by the end of July. The Luxembourg Presidency, however, is working on the matter and, together with the European Commission, appeared rather upbeat on Wednesday because according to one Commission source, the meeting of permanent representatives on 7 July proved to be quite constructive.
Resettlement criteria raised
Nonetheless, the proposal that ministers will be discussing on Thursday will have certain key aspects from the 27 May proposal removed and it currently contains none of the resettlement criteria put forward by the Commission (population, national GDP, rates of unemployment and efforts made in terms of providing asylum).
These criteria, as well as the annexes allocating the number of people to take in per country, have effectively been erased from the ministers' work documents. On 25 June, heads of state and government returned to the conclusions of 23 April to introduce a purely voluntary redistribution mechanism; member states have subsequently not put forward any contributions containing figures in this regard.
In the meantime, a raft of technical questions still needs to be tackled, particularly with regard to the question of what kind of asylum seeker (is it necessary to stick to the Syrian and Eritrean nationals who obtain 75% protection?) and the modes of relocation to other member states once candidates for international protection have been “selected”. Although the Commission proposed that the deadline should just be a month from the moment when an asylum seeker is accepted to that when he goes to the member state where he is being “relocated”, the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the EU, is, on the other hand, proposing two months.
With regard to the other subjects on the agenda, the Home Secretaries will have Thursday morning to hold a discussion on the issue of terrorism, particularly the fight against cyber terrorism. During lunch, they will discuss European action for tackling traffickers and the routes used by criminal trafficking networks. The resettlement of 20,000 refugees currently in the care of the UN outside the EU will also be the subject of discussions on Thursday afternoon but this scheme proposed by the Commission in May has always been based on a voluntary commitment and has therefore gained much more consensus.
The “justice” session on Friday 10 July will be a short one and focus on the new aspects of the European Prosecutor's Office (jurisdictional control and cross-border investigations). Ministers will also discuss the Brussels II regulation and, at lunch, the directive on the protection of the EU's financial interests and the fight against VAT fraud. (Solenn Paulic)