Eastern European member states in the Visegrad Group repeated their refusal on Thursday 13 October to accept compulsory refugee and asylum-seeker quotas and won a degree of support from the European Commission, which said it was open to discussing new asylum proposals.
In a public debate on reform of the asylum system and new European Commission proposals on police departments’ access to Eurodac, the European asylum support bureau and the future European resettlement programme, several Visegrad countries, notably Poland and Hungary, argued that solidarity cannot be forced upon a country and attention should be paid to factors that attract migrants.
Polish minister Mariusz Blaszczak said the Commission had now completely changed its position and now favoured the Visegrad nations, based on recent statements by Jean-Claude Juncker to the effect that solidarity cannot be imposed.
"Flexible solidarity", a notorious concept mooted by the Visegrad nations in Bratislava in July, was not discussed at the meeting, where no tangible proposals were put forward. The Slovak interior minister, Robert Kalinak, said flexible solidarity covered a raft of options, and proposals would soon be forthcoming. He said that several paths had been found recently, perhaps financial aid and help in monitoring common borders, but he did not mention anything specific.
The Slovak minister and European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos seemed confident after the meeting that a compromise on the future asylum system would soon be possible, perhaps later this year.
The ministers had the opportunity on Thursday to back extension of police services’ access to the Eurodac database of asylum-seekers’ digital fingerprints and draw up a balance sheet of measures they took in 2015 in response to the refugee crisis. They also discussed a report discussing a number of shortcomings that was published on the Statewatch website. Although the number of relocations increased in September, they are still too slow to relieve pressure on the two countries under the most pressure, Greece and Italy, where quite large numbers of refugees arrive. The member states are showing "fatigue" about meeting calls from European agencies and experts to deal with cases on the ground. This is the case for the European Asylum Support Organisation (EASO), which the report says is swamped and in a critical situation. Frontex and Europol have also reported on the this fatigue and problems in having their calls for staff met.
Some member states are rejecting relocation demands without any justification or connection with the 2015 decisions, notes the report, stating that Greece’s capabilities are limited, to say the least, and are a "serious problem". (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)