*** modified Tuesday 9 March 11 am ***
National ambassadors to the EU will discuss on Tuesday 9 March – ahead of the meeting of Ministers of the Interior and the joint meeting with the Ministers of Foreign Affairs on 15 March – how to improve return and readmission by countries of origin of irregular migrants by using the visa policy in particular, which allows for a level of conditionality depending on the degree of cooperation from non-Member States.
According to a discussion paper seen by EUROPE, the ambassadors will therefore be invited to discuss actions to be taken under the revised Visa Code, which allows visa fees to be increased in the event of negative cooperation, and lowered should the opposite case be true.
They will be invited to mandate the Presidency to establish a “limited list of those few visa-bound third countries which are the most non-cooperating on readmission” and a ‘positive’ list on which the use of ‘visa’ measures shall depend.
Secondly, they will be asked whether a deadline should be agreed for the Commission to take steps to improve readmission cooperation with non-Member states as a first step, before moving directly to visa-related sanctions.
On 10 February, the European Commission published an initial assessment, but did not name any countries (see EUROPE 12655/16). They noted that in 2020, about 1/3 of non-Member States in question showed good cooperation, 1/3 showed average cooperation and the final third had a more problematic cooperation.
In the discussion paper, the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council notes that some Member States would like to have a clearer picture of those countries that are not cooperating enough.
Others started to reflect on the criteria to be used to determine the use of visa conditionality, with some referring to the lack of cooperation on forced returns and failures in the past to improve levels of cooperation. One delegation expressed its interest in having the most important non-Member States in respect of frontline EU countries taken into account.
“This the right time to launch the debate at a political level on how to strengthen influence over non-Member States through a more strategic and targeted use of existing tools”, including positive and negative incentives, states the Presidency document.
The latter also notes that the Commission report additionally offers Member States a basis for reflection in the possible shortcomings of their national systems with regard to voluntary return, but also the problems of identifying those migrants to be returned and obtaining documents in order to be able to return them. The refusal by non-Member States to readmit some of their forcibly returned nationals also poses a challenge.
Link to the document http://bit.ly/3bro4b9 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)