Brussels, 16/11/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission and Luxembourg's minister for asylum and immigration, Jean Asselborn, who was chairing the Foreign Affairs Council, met in Brussesl on Monday 16 November and again underlined the importance - three days after the terrorist attacks in Paris - of not making a connection between terrorism and the refugees fleeing war in Syria. This was the line taken despite countries such as Poland publicly challenging, over the weekend, the policy conducted by the EU and especially the decisions on relocating 160,000 asylum seekers in the EU.
“A connection must not be made between migration and the fight against terror”, Asselborn said on the sidelines of the Council. “Those who are fleeing barbarians must not be likened to barbarians. It's quite the opposite.” Over the weekend, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had given the same warning. A false Syrian passport found near a suicide bomber in the Bataclan Concert Hall had given way to initial controversy, with one of the perpetrators of the attacks also having been registered entering Greece as a migrant in early October.
Although Poland has said that it now refuses to apply the system for sharing out asylum seekers and although Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban himself confirmed on Monday that the “obligatory quotas” favoured terrorism, the European Commission has not received any formal information about certain member states not applying the relocation decisions.
Not making any judgment on the fact that the Paris attacks could possibly slow down the relocation process - which is already slow - the Commission spokespersons said that a new relocation of 11 refugees had taken place on Sunday 15 November. The Commission did not, however, reveal the name of the country concerned. This now brings the number of relocations carried out to 158 (out of 160,000 to be made).
On Monday, Asselborn said that is was important to ensure at European level that the hotspots (migrant identification centres) be set up and that migrants' digital fingerprinting be carried out according to the rules. On the immigration front, Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk were due to meet Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Antalya, Turkey on Monday, to progress on the action plan on immigration. France's home affairs minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, met his Luxembourg counterpart, Etienne Schneider, and European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos in Brussels on Sunday evening, and reportedly spoke at length about the Greek-Turkish border and how to strengthen it. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)