European leaders did not, as expected, achieve a breakthrough on Friday 14 December on the asylum package and the 5 more or less advanced legislative texts that the European Commission had asked them to endorse (qualifications, resettlement, reception conditions for asylum seekers, European Asylum Agency and the Eurodac Regulation).
In a much longer than expected discussion on the subject, which lasted about an hour and a half, they failed to overcome their differences both on the splitting of this package of measures, but also on the famous Dublin Regulation reform and the concept of solidarity in regards to the reception of asylum seekers.
Several delegations wished to take advantage of this discussion to try to move this split forward when others also sought to modify the draft conclusions to confirm this 'package' logic, in particular Greece and Italy. In the end, it was not possible to come to a compromise one way or the other, with a very active minority, in any case, blocking the splitting of the package and blocking the progress it contains. The Netherlands, for its part, would have liked to amend the text to mention the secondary movements of asylum seekers.
According to one source, several Member States also established a direct link with Schengen controls during this discussion. According to La Libre Belgique, this link was directly made by the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel, who, barely emerging from a serious internal crisis on the UN Migration Pact, threatened to suspend Member States not wishing to receive asylum seekers from the free movement area. He was supported in this by France and Luxembourg, the same source confirmed.
However, these intensive exchanges have not brought any progress to the fate of the "asylum package", nor any breakthrough on the Dublin reform, as the text of the conclusions remains unchanged. However, these conclusions do not commit them in any way in terms of a timetable and actions to be taken on the Package’s texts.
They are thus content to invite them to "redouble their efforts to conclude the negotiations on the Return Directive, on the Asylum Agency and on all elements of the Common European Asylum System in accordance with its previous conclusions and taking into account the different degrees of progress of each of these dossiers". On the other migration issues, they called on co-legislators "to quickly conclude the negotiations on the European border and coastguard corps", an issue on which the Interior Ministers reached a partial agreement on 6 December (see EUROPE 12153).
On this point, the President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, was somewhat annoyed, denouncing the "hypocrisy" of the Member States who had asked him to speed up the timetable for the reform of the former Frontex agency to increase its staff to 10,000 by the end of 2020 and who had recently pointed out that this timetable was impossible and more achievable by 2027, as the Commission had initially correctly proposed. "All Member States have been saying for years that the protection of external borders must be strengthened, thus my surprise that a number of countries, including those most affected, refuse to consider such a strengthening," he said, ironically. The first discussions in the EU Council on increasing the number of staff in the Agency showed that the countries were not ready in terms of timetables, some of which also raised sovereignty issues. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)