Meeting in the evening of Thursday 17 November to discuss solidarity among member states in dealing with refugees and migrants, EU interior ministers did not manage to agree on reform of the Dublin Regulation on member states’ responsibility for dealing with asylum-seekers (EUROPE 11546).
The ministers had been invited to debate a note prepared by the Slovak Presidency of the Council of the EU on "effective" rather than "flexible" solidarity (EUROPE 11570) but a diplomatic source said on Friday 18 November that the reform presented by the European Commission in May was in a deadlock and would take time to resolve.
At present, there is strong opposition among member states to an emergency relocation mechanism that the Commission has proposed as part of reform of the Dublin system for dealing with mass arrivals of refugees, explained the source. Some oppose the fact that the system is automatic, in other words it automatically comes into force whenever there are mass arrivals of refugees. The talks on Thursday evening focused on a mid-way position in the form of a decision the Council of the EU could take each time there is a crisis, but the outline and modalities of the emergency mechanism would be decided in advance.
Several countries were unhappy with the Slovak Presidency, which was trying to promote other types of solidarity as an alternative to sharing out asylum-seekers among the member states, such as financial contributions for front-line countries or finance for countries accepting asylum-seekers.
Angelino Alfano, Italy’s interior minister, said on Facebook on Thursday evening that his country would oppose all the Slovak proposals, describing effective solidarity and flexible solidarity as a "joke". The future Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU also distanced itself from the Slovak proposals. Arriving in Brussels, the Maltese minister responsible for such matters, Carmelo Abela, was pleased that people had stopped talking about flexible solidarity and were talking about effective solidarity instead, saying that solidarity must be fundamental and take the form of a permanent mechanism rather than something that gets discussed every time there is a crisis.
France agreed that member states should, in theory, all be involved to a degree and that no country should be spared from accepting refugees and asylum-seekers. France says that when refugees arrive en masse, a solidarity mechanism is required based on sharing them out, but it did not rule out temporary, justified exemptions, such as a situation of bad unemployment.
The Slovak interior minister, Robert Kalinak, stated on Friday morning, on his arrival at the meeting of interior ministers to discuss security, that the talks on Thursday has lasted more than three hours, had been frank and "passionate", and had managed to move things forward. A conclusions document on the issue would be possible under the Maltese Presidency and improved documents would be submitted to ministers in December outlining compromise solutions, Kalinak stated.
On the question of timing, the minister hinted that reform of the Dublin system might be passed in 2017 and work would be carried out to ensure the legal documents are adopted rapidly. The proposals on Eurodac and EASO should be agreed upon by the end of 2016, but he pointed out that it took six years to reach agreement on the last reform of the Dublin system in the recent asylum legislation. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)