Brussels, 29/11/2002 (Agence Europe) - One can take it or leave it. The Presidency is giving Member States one week in which to agree, without amendments, to its compromise on the Dublin II regulation. If, by next Friday, any Member State is still opposed to the text proposed by written procedure, the Danish Presidency will refuse to hold any further discussion on this regulation on which Member States have been tearing each other apart since it was proposed by the Commission in July 2001. It will then pass the hot potato onto the next Presidency, Council President Bertel Haarder announced.
The Dublin II regulation aims to share out the burden of hosting asylum seekers and processing their dossiers between Member States. It proposes rules to determine which Member State should be responsible for examining requests, according to different criteria. It must replace the Dublin Convention, whereby the State through which the entrant entered, or which had granted a visa, will be responsible for processing the request for asylum, wheresoever that request is presented. The Commission suggested sharing this responsibility by noting in its proposal of regulation that the Member State on whose territory the person stayed for several months without being harassed should take on the request for asylum as well as the person making that request. This proposal has been the subject of various compromises since then, but the principle remains the same. The compromise as proposed by the Presidency, to be taken or left, is that which was very recently suggested in a Council working group by the Commission: the responsibility of the State whereby the person enters the EU should come to an end after one year. Over and beyond that limit, or if it is impossible to determine where the person arrived, the State where the request is made will not be responsible if the asylum seeker has already stayed at least 5 months in one or several member States (in the last case, the State in which the person stayed last of all will be responsible). Greece and Italy call for shorter periods in order to reduce their responsibility. On the other hand, the countries towards which the asylum seekers move the most (France, Germany, United Kigndom …- ask for them to be extended.
The Council spent most of its time on Thursday discussing this text - in the morning, at lunch and during the evening. Before the last discussion, Mr Haarder had a one-to-one discussion with his British, Italian, French and Belgian counterparts. "There is no alternative. We have tried all the amendments proposed by the Member States and none were possible", he insisted, out of breath, on Thursday evening. European Commissioner Antonio Vitorino gave him support. The Presidency's proposal of compromise is accompanied by a declaration on the link between this regulation and the Eurodac index which contains fingerprints of asylum seekers, and which will therefore allow one to see whether requests for asylum are made in several countries successively under different names. This system will take effect on 1 January 2003. Mr Haarder stressed that he hoped the Dublin II regulation would take effect in June 2003.
The aim of the regulation is to settle the phenomenon of "asylum shopping", namely the fact that asylum seekers often make a request for asylum in the country where they have the most likelihood of being accepted - with the risk that their request will be examined in a country other than where the asylum seeker has family ties, for example. The aim is also to settle problems such as that of the Sangatte centre where persons having entered by southern Europe often remain several months in France but do not put in a request for asylum until they reach Great Britain.
According to the aims fixed in Seville, the Council should have reached a political agreement on this text during the November session, in order to adopt it formally in December.