Brussels, 04/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - Meeting in Brussels on Friday 4 December, the home affairs ministers of the EU called upon the Commission to continue monitoring the Schengen area of free movement and have not ruled out the possibility that if serious deficiencies are observed at certain points of the external borders by March 2016, a proposal could be made to allow controls on the internal borders to be extended beyond that point.
The idea is that “if this crisis continues, we have a European framework”, said Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg's minister for asylum and migration. This despite the fact that several countries have re-established, unilaterally in some cases, temporary controls on their internal borders. This extension within a European framework is based on the use of Article 26, which allows these controls to be extended for a maximum of two years (adding all renewed periods together). To trigger this decision, the Commission must have first asked to assess the area and recommended preventative actions to improve the situation, but no formal decision to this end was made on Friday.
The fact is that the ministers have discussed the time limits on the internal border controls, Asselborn explained. They asked about the mechanisms they may be able to use after March 2016 if the situation fails to return to normal. The member states which have brought in temporary controls, such as Germany, Austria and, more recently, France, will not be able to extend these measures after March.
The European Commission officially explained that the monitoring missions would not change and that Article 19 of the Schengen Borders Code, which precedes the activation of Article 26, had not been mentioned. The Commission, a spokesperson pointed out, regularly carries out monitoring missions inside and outside Schengen, for instance by means of unannounced inspections. In mid-December, it will publish its six-monthly health report on the free movement area. Dimitris Avramopoulos said that “Schengen is not a problem”. “If we follow the rules, we can safeguard the security of the Europeans”, he said, particularly stressing controls on the external borders.
The future of Schengen is unquestionably a cause of concern for the ministers. According to Asselborn, they all reiterated their commitment to this common area on Friday, but “it will only work if the rules are followed”, the president of the Council said. The ministers therefore accepted both “reinforced coordination upstream of the announced national decisions” which have an impact on the neighbours, and increased surveillance of the external borders. Incidentally, Greece activated the RABIT rapid border intervention mechanism on Friday.
Furthermore, the ministers had no good news to report regarding the relocation mechanism for 160,000 people, which a number of countries have challenged before the Court of Justice and which is proving extremely slow to take off. On this point, the Luxembourg minister was extremely clear, ruling out German proposals to launch a resettlement programme for refugees currently in Turkey. “It's too late”, Asselborn said, stressing that there was no time to lose on this subject and that they needed to focus on relocations. The European Commission plans to present an initiative on 15 December. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)