At the end of a meeting with Austria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache on Thursday 5 July, Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that his country wants to negotiate with Italy and Greece on sending back migrants who have submitted a request for asylum in these two countries.
"Asylum seekers who have submitted their application in Italy and Greece and are intercepted at the border between Germany and Austria will be placed in transit centres then taken to Rome or Athens", Seehofer said, expecting "difficult" negotiations between the German government and his Italian and Greek counterparts.
Should these discussions fail, Seehofer said that the three EU member states will have to come to an agreement on new measures enabling them to fight illegal immigration.
Austria will not be concerned by this type of measure, Seehofer, who heads of the CSU party in Bavaria, stated. Migrants registered in the Eurodac database, but who have not made a request for asylum and tried their chances for the north of Europe, are indeed not concerned.
Satisfied with the precision brought by Seehofer, Kurz said that the "German measures will not have effect in Austria".
As a result, there will not at this stage be a domino effect with the closure of borders in the south of Austria and thus jeopardy to the Schengen area of free movement. This was the fear raised by the Austrian authorities before knowing in detail the intentions of the German government within which the CSU party is exerting strong pressure on its Christian Democrat brother party, the CDU.
Visiting Berlin, where he met Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave assurances that his country would not admit on its territory any migrant intercepted further north. In Seehofer's view, Germany will not send any migrant to Hungary because the people concerned should probably be transferred to Greece, where they submitted an asylum application.
The three leaders did not put forward the official statistics on the number of people concerned.
These discussions will continue at the informal ministerial meeting of European interior ministers in Innsbruck on Thursday 12 and Friday 13 July. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)