Meeting in Brussels on Friday 9 December, EU interior ministers, in the last Council meeting under the Slovak Presidency, were unable to agree on the details of ‘effective solidarity,’ a concept that Bratislava wanted to promote during its time at the helm of the EU for reform of the Dublin system of asylum rules and also more generally for refugee crisis management.
The talks will now continue under the Maltese Presidency. Slovak interior minister Robert Kalinak said the question had not failed as some progress has been made. A year ago, he said there had been two totally opposing camps on the relocation of 160,000 asylum-seekers, but the situation now was somewhere in the middle. He said that these days, there is consensus that relocations should not be seen as a very effective solution to refugee crises.
He added that they were on the way to agreement and that it had taken six years to adopt the last Dublin Regulation.
The Presidency had prepared for a dinner on the subject a brief progress report on the talks, which suggested that the Slovak Presidency has not yet wholly won its case.
While there is consensus that the relocation of asylum-seekers among member states cannot be the sole response to refugee crises, a source says that nothing has yet been decided in terms of measures for managing future crises.
Some flexibility is considered worthy of consideration, such as the amount of aid member state could provide for acute refugee crises, such as the one that hit the EU in 2015, but there is still reluctance to allow member states to pick and choose measures they can adopt for playing their part in providing solidarity on refugee matters.
For example, no member states should be exempt from particular measures or the additional mechanism for allocating asylum-seekers to countries (dividing migrants up among the member states), which should form part of the measures used to respond to the crisis, as should aid for securing external borders or financial aid for European agencies. In the note, the Presidency says that while these measures still need to be defined, the idea of fairness among member states seems unavoidable and each country should therefore participate in all the measures.
A week ago, an official source was not very optimistic about the possibility of agreement being reached at this meeting on 9 December. On Wednesday 7 December, another diplomatic source said there was agreement on the Slovak Presidency’s three-stage approach whereby refugee crises would be addressed according to their intensity, but many member states are not prepared to agree to some countries being exempt from the requirement to house extra asylum-seekers in major crises.
This is the question that needs to be settled by the Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU. Areas of reflection include the question of criteria and thresholds for launching the first crisis management measures. The diplomatic source said the debate ‘will take some time.’ (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)