Valletta, 12/11/2015 (Agence Europe) - The main issues that brought the EU heads of state and government together on the sidelines of the Valletta summit on migration on Thursday 12 November were speeding up cooperation with Turkey (a partner with which a specific summit will be organised in Brussels in the weeks ahead), and speeding up the time for implementing relocation decisions for refugees in the EU and the consequences of these decisions on the Schengen area.
Meeting for around three hours, the European leaders (except for those of the UK, Ireland, Poland and Portugal) mainly spoke about cooperation with Turkey - cooperation that will enable the EU's external borders to be stabilised, the Europeans hope (even if European Council President Donald Tusk believed that other partners, especially those from the Western Balkans, had the same role to play in regulating these migration flows). Cooperation will also have to be launched with Jordan and Lebanon.
On Turkey, the member states accepted the principle of an EU-Turkey summit which could be held in Brussels before the end of November or at the start of December. The EU is in fact awaiting the formation of the new government following the elections on 1 November, and this summit will then enable negotiations on the EU-Turkey action plan (see EUROPE 11412). It could also address the issues of visa liberalisation (wanted by Ankara) and EU accession chapters.
However, here, as with the trust fund for Africa and Syria (see other articles), the member states are stumbling over finance. The European Commission has proposed that Turkey receive an envelope of €3 billion for 2016 and 2017 in exchange for regulating migration flows to Greece (Turkey wants €3 billion per year) and has already proposed €500 million from the European budget. The member states will have to contribute the remaining €2.5 billion. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who said that this financial aid was not for Turkey itself, but for the Syrian or Iraqi refugees who are in Turkey, was nevertheless confident that the Europeans would manage this. On his side, British Prime Minister David Cameron, announced on Thursday morning that the UK was ready to give £275 million to Turkey.
By contrast, French President François Hollande did not make any commitment. He said that no financing had been decided on Thursday and the amount to be released had not yet been totally established.
“Orders of magnitude have been agreed. What the European budget can provide and what will have to come from the member states. I asked for a technical group to be set up to work on this issue and to stick, as far as possible, within the framework of the European budget”, Hollande announced.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the summit with Turkey would serve to show that “we will work closely together and that we share the challenges raised by the civil war in Syria and the difficult situations in other countries”, Reuters reports. She was of the view that this meeting would demonstrate that “we have a shared responsibility for war refugees”, adding that there would “probably be more than one meeting with Turkey”, but that this kind of arrangement would not necessarily become the “usual format”.
Speed of relocation too slow. The informal meeting aimed to continue a number of discussions already begun in Brussels on 23 September, relating in the main to the state of health of the Schengen area of free movement (see EUROPE 11395). On Thursday 12 November, it was the turn of Sweden, following on from Germany, Austria and Slovenia which had come to their decisions in mid-September, to announce that it was temporarily re-introducing border controls. Time is short, in Tusk's view, if Schengen is to be saved. “Every week decisions are being taken in Europe which make plain the seriousness of the situation”, he said. “Technical barriers, temporary controls at internal borders, all of that shows that action is needed at our external borders”, he argued.
On this point, some concrete results were achieved, with three countries of the Visegrad group - Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary - pledging to provide close to 300 staff (Tusk spoke of 225) to strengthen the capacities of Frontex and EASO. The Council president said again that “our laws must be applied” and migrants who refused to be registered would have no rights, he stressed. Juncker said once more that he was “not at all happy at the speed of relocation”, only 147 refugees having so far been relocated from Greece and Italy, out of 160,000. “At this speed”, relocation will take “until 1 January 2101”, he pointed out sardonically (our translation throughout). (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic and Camille-Cerise Gessant)