The Jacques Delors Institute, chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, urged European governments and the future Commission on Monday 28 January to engage in enhanced cooperation on asylum to remedy the failure of the revision of the Dublin Regulation.
This proposal was launched on the occasion of the publication of a new report entitled "For a European policy on asylum, migration and mobility", written by former European civil servant Jérôme Vignon, for whom the aim is to succeed in giving a "real answer to people" on migration, he told the Brussels Press Club.
Mr Letta stressed that this discourse on migration should not be left only to anti-European parties, "who do not want a solution" on asylum to exploit this vacuum and "people's fears", referring to his compatriot and Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini.
What would this enhanced cooperation consist of? It would bring together voluntary "solidarity" countries to take care of asylum seekers who have arrived in Europe. This, on the basis of an allocation key, as proposed by the Commission in May 2016, explained the author of the report. Italy, along with the other front-line countries, will have to be in the system, Jérôme Vignon insists, because it has everything to gain from this system, which would automatically relocate asylum seekers. It would act in exchange on the management of the external border. For both Mr Letta and Mr Vignon, it is also time to clarify the instruments of legal migration, which are too numerous. They must therefore be merged into a single tool. For Jérôme Vignon, the Dublin treaties are no longer adapted to the current situation.
These solutions would finally provide a response to the migration challenge that has continued to dominate the debate over the past five years and which, according to Mr Letta, has had "a decisive influence onBrexit" or other "political tremors" in the EU, such as the new Italian authorities.
The Commission seems to be abandoning at this stage its reform of the Dublin Regulation, which has been bogged down for two years and on which the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU does not believe it will succeed either. In the meantime, it calls on volunteer States to work on a temporary framework that predictably responds to the landings of rescued migrants. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)