On Thursday 9 March in Brussels, the interior ministers of the EU Member States will again discuss the state of health of the Schengen area of free movement as well as asylum and migration, both internally with the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’ and externally with the latest events in the central Mediterranean.
This last discussion on asylum and migration will be quite long, as the Swedish Presidency has scheduled about 2 hours of debate, which should already feed into the next European Summit.
There will also be an exchange of views on EU visa policy, between calls for restrictive measures against uncooperative third countries on the return of illegal immigrants and calls for a review of the mechanism for suspending visa-free regimes for third countries that benefit from them but whose nationals are allegedly abusing them.
Countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium, but also Switzerland, will also use the meeting to call for the full application of the current Dublin rules and the provisions on transfers of asylum seekers to the Member State primarily responsible.
Several countries are complaining that they can no longer make these transfers, for example to countries such as Italy, which points to the lack of reception places to take them back.
The ministers will also have on their agenda a negative assessment of the implementation of the interoperability of European information systems, which is still delayed due to a problem with the main contractor of the eu-LISA agency, which is in charge of setting up the technical architecture.
At lunch, they will discuss internal security in Ukraine.
No decisions, but very sensitive discussions
Despite a busy agenda, no decisions are expected on Thursday, but the ministers will nevertheless deal with very sensitive issues.
Italy and Malta were to raise the issue of search and rescue operations at sea, following the 26 February sinking off Crotone. This is against a background of renewed difficulties with Tunisia, with the number of departures to the EU from Tunisia having risen sharply in 2022.
“The question of a possible cooperation framework for search and rescue at sea, especially for NGOs, has been raised for almost 10 years with a number of NGO ships making humanitarian efforts and trying to rescue some people who arrive in small boats and then trying to transport them mainly to Italy. We wondered whether it was possible to have more structured discussions with the NGOs that run these boats. There has been talk of a code of conduct, but it has not managed to get enough support”, a diplomatic source said on 8 March.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin could also address the new British bill that aims to prevent the arrival of migrants in the UK, particularly from Calais.
With regard to the ‘Pact on Migration and Asylum’, the Ministers will also be informed about the state of play of the various regulations as the Swedish Presidency makes progress on the ‘Asylum and Migration Management’ regulation (ex-Dublin) and MEPs are preparing to vote on several mandates, possibly at the end of March on the Screening Regulation and at the end of April on the other texts, such as the Asylum Procedures and Crisis Situations Regulations.
While, according to one source, the “hardest” part is yet to come within the Member States, as discussions have remained essentially technical at this stage, another source said on Thursday that he was “quite confident” that the Swedish Presidency could obtain a mandate on the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR) in June, and even on the Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR).
This source mentions intense work by the Presidency and even the beginning of a consensus on the solidarity mechanism provided for under the AMMR. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)