The European Home Affairs Ministers, meeting on Thursday 5 March at the ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ Council under the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the European Union, devoted a large part of their discussions to the escalation of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and its potential repercussions on European security.
While the conflict in Iran and the precarious fate of detention centres in Syria remain sources of major concern, Magnus Brunner, Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs, and Nicholas Ioannides, Cypriot Minister for Migration and International Protection, were reassuring about the EU’s capacity to react at the end of the meetings.
“We are not seeing any significant outward migration from Iran”, said Mr Brunner, adding however that “we must remain vigilant”. He assured us that the EU was in contact “with its partners in the region” to anticipate any changes. “We’re in a different situation than we were in 2016. Since then, we have begun to ‘put the EU in order’ with a number of reforms. And the results are good”, he added, noting that illegal border crossings have fallen by more than 15% over the last two years.
In his view, this resilience is based in particular on the deployment of advanced digital control systems such as the ‘Entry/Exit’ system, which is considered to be “incredibly important for Europe’s security”. Mr Ioannides added that European “infrastructures, procedures and legislation” had in fact been strengthened in order to respond to this type of crisis.
This desire to contain any risk at source is shared by the Member States. Gerhard Karner, Austria’s Minister of the Interior, stressed the importance of maintaining close contact with Türkiye and monitoring the Iraq-Iran border. For his part, his Swedish counterpart, Johan Forssell, insisted that the EU could not afford a “repeat of the refugee crisis of 10 years ago”. In his view, the European response should be limited as mush as possible to providing humanitarian aid on the ground, with “emergency supplies” and accommodation, in order to offer protection to people as close as possible to the conflict zone and avoid excessive migratory flows. (Original version in French by Justine Manaud)