On Tuesday 8 May, the national ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) failed to reach a unanimous agreement on the financing details for the second tranche of €3 billion for the Refugee Facility in Turkey (see EUROPE 12015).
“We thought that an agreement was possible”, a European source said. The member states seemed prepared to support the compromise proposal of the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, taking €2 billion from the EU budget, including €700 million from a budgetary redeployment. The remaining €1 billion would be fed in by the member states under a distribution key based on national GDP.
Two countries, Belgium and Italy, kept reservations in place until the last minute. Having secured guarantees over the redeployment of monies within the EU budget, the Belgian authorities finally lifted their reservation. Their Italian counterparts were not able to follow suit, as there was no clear political signal from Rome.
In this dossier, Italy, the country of first entry for migrants from Libya, is calling for guarantees over the financing of the EU emergency trust fund for Africa, which is still underfunded. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)