Brussels, 24/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 24 February, the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, repeated his calls to the member states to reach a unified solution to respond to the migration crisis. Addressing the MEPs, who were to debate the results of the European Summit of 18 and 19 February given over to the United Kingdom and the migration crisis, President Tusk reiterated that there is “no alternative to a global solution” and that “plans A, B, C and D make no sense”.
If decisions on the management of the borders are still being made in the capitals, “we need to improve the way these decisions are coordinated”, Tusk said, also calling upon the member states to apply the rules they have adopted, such as those on the relocation of 160,000 refugees over two years, or indeed the Schengen rules. “We need to invest in Schengen, not bring it tumbling down”, the President of the European Council added, with the unilateral decisions made by Austria regarding the transit of migrants on its territory and the daily threshold of asylum seekers having unsettled its partners and with several member states carrying out controls on their internal borders due to the migratory flows.
In any event,the Schengen zone will be a “key point” of the European summit of 7 March, which will be given over to the EU/Turkey action plan, Tusk told the MEPs. The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, also reiterated on Wednesday that “there can only be a European solution” to the migration crisis and that “national solutions are obstacles on that road”.
In the view of the leader of the EPP group at the EP, Germany's Manfred Weber, “there is a great deal of national egotism, everywhere”, as he commented to explain the crisis, adding that the commitment is currently quite clear to “secure the borders, also getting NATO involved”.
ECR group member Ashley Fox said that there was indeed a need to “secure the borders, set in place handling centres and give priority to refugees who are already in the camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey”. The British MEP suggested that it was possibly “slightly perverse to give priority to those who cross the sea”.
Gabi Zimmer, the chair of the GUE/NGL group, said that everything possible must be done to ensure that the “borders remain open” and stressed the need to “provide Greece with concrete help”. The German co-president of the Greens/EFA, Rebecca Harms, said that it was a “shame that there was not enough talk of refugees” at the summit and a shame that the subject had been “postponed until the EU/Turkey summit”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)