Brussels, 09/11/2015 (Agence Europe) - Meeting in Brussels for a further informal meeting on the migration crisis on Monday 9 November, the EU home affairs ministers tried to give credibility to the decisions adopted on sharing out refugees, and they also decided on new measures to manage the unprecedented flows of migrants.
The ministers thus paved the way to the creation of centres for handling asylum requests all along the Balkans route - centres where migrants could be identified, registered and possibly returned to their country of origin if their request for protection proves unfounded. The aim of this is “to slow down the flows, should there be a massive influx”, said Luxembourg's minister for asylum and immigration, Jean Asselborn. In his view, it is impossible to leave Greece all alone in managing the arrival of sometimes up to 10,000 people in a single day and “on average 5,000 people a day” - as is the case on the island of Lesbos.
These centres for handling requests come in addition to the creation of 100,000 reception places all along the Balkans route - the decision for which was taken on 25 October. According to Asselborn, the request-handling centres could thus be set up both in the EU countries that are on this route and also in the non-EU Balkan countries.
These request-handling centres would have the same role as the “hotspots” set up in Italy and Greece as regards the registration of migrants, but they would not necessarily be for following up on a relocation system - even if future thought might still be given to this. The minister will nevertheless have to discuss this new concept in further detail. “The policy of letting people cross borders must be stopped”, Asselborn warned, although he recognised that “no button” exists that can be pushed to stop the flows. “Europe must remain open but there are rules which must be respected” he added.
“We also discussed, for the first time, the lack of cooperation from the migrants”, Asselborn said - for example, in fingerprinting and registration. In their conclusions, the ministers thus stated that the European acquis allowed several measures for addressing this - in particular, detention as a last resort. Asselborn also said that the migrants could not themselves choose the country to which they want to be relocated.
The member states also decided to ramp up their information campaign for migrants particularly in the third countries to raise awareness of the rights to which they can legitimately claim in the EU and potentially to dissuade them from travelling. The conclusions state that the first liaison officers should be deployed as a matter of priority to Ethiopia, Niger, Pakistan and Serbia by the end of January 2016. Discussions on readmission agreements and return policy should also be intensified with Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey and Afghanistan. Germany's minister Thomas de Maizière indicated that Afghanistan was felt by his country to be problematic because of the influx of migrants from there.
Domestically, Monday's meeting was also about speeding up relocations, with only 147 refugees out of the 160,000 that the EU countries had promised, in September, to make having so far been relocated from Greece and Italy. Implementation of the decisions taken was “too slow”, opined de Maizière on his arrival in Brussels. The meeting, then, also had an eye on putting pressure on Italy and Greece to make sure that the so-called hotspots” become fully operational by the end of this month.
The other member states, too, had commitments to be met. Ministers, therefore, set a series of deadlines to be complied with, including on providing the assistance in the form of personnel that the Frontex and EASO agencies had asked of them at the start of October. Ideally, the member states will have indicated by 16 November the number of officers they can make available to the two agencies in their efforts to ease some of the strain on the Greek and Italian authorities in processing the migrants, and also have nominated liaison officers to help in the relocations. The ministers, lastly, agreed that, in December, they would discuss the state of health of the Schengen free movement area after a number of member states have, since mid-September, reintroduced controls at their internal borders in response to the migratory pressure. They also agreed to continue discussions on outstanding legislative proposals, such as the list of safe countries of origin and the permanent mechanism for sharing out refugees among the member states, even though the conclusions do not use the term “permanent” - an issue that continues to cause deep divisions among the member states. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)