Brussels, 07/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission wants to place migration right at the heart of its relations with third countries, in particular African countries but also those of the Middle East, such as Lebanon and Jordan. On Tuesday 7 June, it set out a general strategy for managing migration, based on financial incentives that could bring total investment of €62 billion.
The Commission, its First Vice-President Frans Timmermans told MEPs in Strasbourg, proposes dual action: in the short term, providing the priority countries with incentives, including financial, to better manage their borders and keep refugees in their own countries and, in the long term, financing the socio-economic development of these countries.
The priority countries are Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Ethiopia, Senegal, Lebanon and Jordan. Contact has also been established with Libya and Tunisia, those these two countries are not, at this stage, directly targeted by these partnerships.
The Commission's ultimate goal is to help these countries keep their people in their homeland. “The countries that agree to work with us will receive special treatment”, a European source said a little earlier on Tuesday in Brussels. Dialogue with these countries will also focus on returns, with the rate of returns of illegal migrants having to be increased for the overall policy to be credible, the source said.
In concrete terms, the Commission will seek to set up tailored partnerships with these key countries of origin and transit making use of various external policy financial instruments, such as external funds (for example, the trust fund for Africa) and trade policy instruments. According to the Commission, €62 billion could be raised from various sources including the private sector to finance the general policy in the longer term. What is being considered at the moment is a tool similar to the European fund for strategic investments (EFSI), the financial arm of the Juncker investment plan (see other article).
Timmermans, then, announced the creation of an external investment plan that is expected to trigger investments of up to €31 billion, with the potential to rise to €62 billion with the involvement of the member states and private players. The Commission will make €3.1 billion available for the new fund when it is presented in the autumn.
In the short term, the Commission has also decided to add €1 billion to the trust fund for Africa. It will provide €500 million from the European development fund reserve and request the other €500 million from the member states. Between now and 2020, the Commission wants to be able to deploy €8 billion in total to this policy.
Conditions set. In exchange for EU commitments on finance, the priority countries will have to show willing on managing their borders and on readmission of their nationals who have entered the EU illegally. The target countries will have to meet their international obligations in the area, without the Commission having to agree readmission deals with them. They will also have, for example, to accept the returns documents provided by the member states in the return procedure and improve their own civil registries to make it easier to identify those returned.
The Commission will carefully assess these efforts and a country that does not pull its weight could be penalised financially. Where there is good cooperation, the rewards will be considerable, Commission officials say.
Timmermans says that, in the immediate instance, this strategy addresses the danger faced by migrants as they try to cross the Mediterranean Sea fleeing their countries. He also gave the example of the EU-Turkey migration agreement which has caused the numbers of migrants arriving in Greece to fall. “Whether one likes it or not, the agreement with Turkey is working”, a European source said a little earlier.
The parallel made with the agreement concluded by the EU with Turkey in March (see EUROPE 11515), raised some concerns among MEPs. While the general thrust presented by the Commission is good, “there are a number of problems” in the agreement with Turkey, in the view of Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium), leader of the ALDE Group. He said that, should this model be replicated with other countries, there could be concerns about migrants' rights.
Barbara Spinelli (GUE/NGL, Italy) said that the Commission was quite simply laying down a diktat by making economic aid dependent on border management and migration. The EPP and S&G Groups considered the Commission's approach to be the right one on condition that the member states make it credible by supporting it. The fund for Africa has not yet been fully financed and promises are still far from being kept, noted Manfred Weber (EPP, Germany). (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)