Brussels, 19/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - After more than six hours of tense discussions in Brussels, the European Union heads of state and government decided late on Thursday evening 18 February to call a special summit with Turkey to review the joint action plan on the fight against illegal immigration.
At the end of the first day's work, European Council President Donald Tusk announced that the objective of this summit will be to reaffirm that the action plan is the pillar of the EU's strategy for tackling the migration crisis, especially with the resettlement programmes. The format of the summit is still to be defined, but it is likely to be a meeting with all the European leaders.
Today, the EU28 spoke at length about how they are managing the migration crisis and, as Tusk said, the unilateral measures that disturb the implementation of a common solution. He was especially targeting Austria, which decided on the eve of the European Council to set a daily threshold of 80 for asylum applications and a limit of 3,200 people being able to transit its territory. These were measures which “some leaders liked”, as Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy stated, but which also provoked anger from other leaders and from the European Commission, which has written to Vienna to tell it that this threshold of asylum seekers is illegal.
For Tusk, it is time “to avoid plans A, B or C (because) this makes no sense and creates divisions”. He also said that there is currently “no other good alternative to a global approach” for managing this migration crisis.
Tusk once again underlined that the member states should coordinate their decisions and that it was important “to respect the decisions that we have all taken together and to come back to a situation where all member states apply the Schengen rules”. He was thus alluding to the decisions on refugee resettlement and to the internal border controls that have been set up by some countries.
For European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, the discussion enabled “confirmation that there is no alternative” to cooperation with Turkey. He added that “those who doubted a European approach must be adopted said unanimously this evening that the steps must be European and that national 'solos' are not to be recommended”. He also observed that some member states which previously took distance from the arrangement said they would “use the refugee resettlement mechanism”.
At a press conference at the end of the first day of the Council, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “pleased with the discussion this evening because it showed (there was) a common denominator”. “We said it is important to take decisions as 28, to protect the borders better, and to reduce the number of refugees and illegal migration”, she said. “We underlined the need for the EU-Turkey action plan. This plan will be monitored with great attention. We would like to implement it swiftly”, she said, adding that “as regards border surveillance, everyone supported NATO's action. This engagement will start on 24 February at the latest”.
With regard to the Austrian measures, “there will be an assessment in March. It's good we will see each other again in a fortnight to talk with Turkey and assess our action”, Merkel stated. According to a French diplomatic source, the challenge in the coming days is to find assurance that “the cooperation with Turkey enables sufficient results to avoid a plan B with internal borders being set up again”.
In its conclusions, the European Council recognised Greece's efforts at implementing the hotspot registration points for refugees and the gradual improvement in these, with progress in registering migrants and security controls. However, much remains to be done, the Council stated, to make these hotspots fully operational so as to be able to implement the resettlement decisions fully. The conclusions also state that implementation of the action plan with Turkey must be a priority and that the migrant flows arriving in Greece from Turkey are still “much too high”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic with Sophie Petitjean, Camille-Cerise Gessant, Mathieu Bion and Elodie Lamer)