Member state ambassadors meeting at the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) on Thursday 19 April discussed reform of the Dublin regulation which determines EU member state responsibility for processing asylum requests.
They examined work conducted by the “Friends of the Presidency” group, given that the Bulgarian presidency had chosen the “SCIFA” format for scrutinising the articles of the regulation one by one. The regulation has been blocked since 2016 on the question of the mandatory quotas of asylum seekers. The permanent representatives sought to assess the work which is being done by these technical groups.
Thursday’s discussion was on chapters 1-6, which above all concern the attribution of responsibilities and obligations of member states concerned, the list of criteria to take into account when examining asylum requests, the way to avoid secondary movements or the prior controls of applicants’ files, and the amount of time that a member state can be responsible for the request. Work continues on these chapters as well as on the rest of the regulation (nine chapters in total) and the permanent representatives will discuss them again on 2 and 15 May, a Bulgarian presidency source said.
So far, there has been no real breakthrough, notably on the very controversial chapter of emergency relocation of asylum seekers in the event of a migration crisis. It is therefore difficult to say whether the European Council will manage to reach an agreement by consensus during June, as it had undertaken to do last December. Especially since the position taken by Italy, which has hitherto called for a sound solidarity mechanism, hangs on the formation of a government, one source explains, and as the Hungarian anti-quota stance was strengthened with Viktor Orban’s victory on 8 April. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)