On Wednesday 20 June, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called an informal meeting of the European leaders in Brussels on Sunday 24 June, in order to try to prepare the discussions that will be held at the European summit on Thursday 28 June regarding the challenge of migration.
This idea of a preparatory meeting was aired on the German side last weekend, and was confirmed at the meeting between Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Emmanuel Macron in Meseberg on Tuesday (see EUROPE 12043).
"I don't like chairing meetings between a few member states, but as others refuse to do this, there must be someone who chairs", Juncker said at the end of his meeting on Wednesday with France's Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. In Juncker's view, this is about "an inclusive process that deserves preparation".
The exact number of countries that will attend on Sunday was not yet known on Wednesday. It is, however, known that Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Austria, France, Greece, Italy and Malta will be attending.
In a preparatory meeting for the migration discussions that it will unveil on Thursday, the Commission is expected to develop the idea raised in a draft of the European Council conclusions, relating to the concept of "regional disembarkation platforms" that are intended to identify, outside the EU, those migrants who could claim EU asylum.
According to a European source, this is reportedly a concept from Juncker that was discussed in April with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). And Austria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz brought it up during the recent visit of the Austrian government ot the European Commission (see EUROPE 12035).
The details are expected to be studied at this informal meeting on Sunday, but at this stage the idea would be to find a port in a safe third country (perhaps Tunisia) for welcoming people rescued at sea.
The platforms, which are in no way "camps outside the EU", according to the same European source, would be managed on the ground by the HCR and IOM. The people rescued and taken to these safe third countries would be identified, a little like the famous 'hotspots' in the EU. The people who could claim asylum could go to the European Union, where another destination would be found for them. The rest of the people would be asked to return to their country voluntarily and could benefit from regional programmes to address this.
The next question is what the third countries concerned would obtain in return. "Financial support" but also advantages linked "to the European framework of resettlement that is being finalised", the same source said.
Asylum. In Brussels on Sunday, the leaders could also focus on a type of 'Dublin+ Regulation' that would enable interested member countries to accelerate, on a bilateral basis, the returns of asylum seekers to the first country where they were registered through the Eurodac system.
The current so-called 'Dublin' rules already allow the returns of these asylum seekers. A Bulgarian avenue for reform makes these modalities for return more flexible: a member state wanting to return an asylum seeker would thus no longer need formal approval from the country where the asylum seeker was deposited, as a simple notification sent to the country of first entry would be enough.
For Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is in full-on conflict with Merkel, these avenues for work clearly do not go far enough when the concept of regional platforms aims to prevent the unilateral decisions of Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.
In the end it will be for the European summit to finalise these proposals and to decide on them, at the end of June.
Against this backdrop, Udo Bullmann (S&D, Germany), Guy Verhofstadt (ALDE, Belgium) and Ska Keller (Greens/EFA, Germany) have written to European Council President Donald Tusk to remind him that the European Parliament's position on the reform of the European asylum system provides for a balance between responsibility and solidarity through the creation of an automatic relocation mechanism in the EU for asylum seekers (see EUROPE 11887).
Greece wants Bulgarian compromise
At the European Parliament on Wednesday, Greece's Minister for Migration Dimitris Vitsas spoke about his country's expectations on migration issues, hailing the working of the Parliament's civil liberties committee.
Vitsas also deplored the fact that the current debate only focuses on the transfers of asylum seekers from country to country, when the phenomenon of secondary movement does not, in his opinion, prove true.
And the taboo subject, in Vitsas' opinion, is the allocation of asylum seekers between member states. Rather than focusing on the returns, it is important to help Germany deal with these asylum seekers. "Relocation must be the main element for the management of migrant flows", he said, calling for the Bulgarian work, even if imperfect, not to be in vain (see EUROPE 12034). (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)