In addition to their discussion on the handling of Ukrainian refugees in the EU (see related article), the EU Interior Ministers, meeting in Brussels on 3 March, will take part in the first Schengen Council announced by French President Emmanuel Macron on 2 February in Tourcoing.
This project for better political steering of the free movement area is one of the major issues of the French Presidency of the EU Council, which wanted to keep it on the Ministers’ agenda despite the international context.
The Ministers will also be invited on Thursday to give their political endorsement to the revision of the Schengen evaluation mechanism on the basis of the proposal made by the Commission last June, but will not be able to discuss the progress of the work on the revision of the Schengen Borders Code tabled on 14 December, as the French Presidency preferred to postpone the political discussion initially planned (see EUROPE 12897/17).
The Ministers will also try to validate the first step of the gradual approach wanted by Paris on the ‘Migration and Asylum Pact’, even if the current situation of countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary casts doubt on the capacity of the Member States to give this green light already.
Over lunch, they will also meet with their Latin American counterparts to discuss the fight against drugs. A declaration will reflect this discussion.
Schengen Governance
For this first ‘Schengen Council’, the Commission has been asked in recent weeks to work on a barometer of the situation at the external borders or in Schengen, assessing for example the levels of arrivals, asylum applications in the EU, voluntary resettlement or relocation actions in 2020 and 2021, or the volume of so-called ‘Dublin’ transfers between Member States.
This barometer, which was based on statistics from Frontex or the European Agency for Asylum, will feed into the discussion on the general state of the Schengen area. The Commission will also appoint a Schengen coordinator from within the Commission, who will, among other things, be responsible for presenting the Schengen Scoreboard three times a year. The coordinator will prepare and manage the follow-up of the Schengen Council meetings and will intervene in crisis situations at the external borders.
This new Schengen Council will also be associated with a new solidarity mechanism at the external borders allowing, for example, according to a preparatory note, the rapid deployment of Frontex at a critical point of the common border or other means of assistance from the Member States. This solidarity platform will not take the form of a new structure, but will be part of the continuity of the IPCR group which manages crisis situations in the EU.
Pact
This was one of the objectives of the French Presidency after the Lille informal (see EUROPE 12883/2): to get the Interior Ministers to approve the gradual approach of implementing responsibility tools (filtering of migrants, Eurodac) in exchange for a commitment of solidarity (financial aid to countries under pressure or voluntary relocation).
Paris would like to obtain a political agreement on Thursday and then move on to the technical work of adoption. The war in Ukraine, however, casts doubt on the ability of countries like Poland to as of now give the green light and commit to alternative financial support for relocation for other Member States, if the country is to take on hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees in the coming months and years.
According to one source, the French Presidency could at least put a roadmap on the table on Thursday to determine the next steps to move forward on this ‘Migration and Asylum Pact’.
Link to documents on Schengen: https://aeur.eu/f/kv and (in French) https://aeur.eu/f/ku (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)