Berlin, 12/01/2007 (Agence Europe) - A few days ahead of the meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers to discuss cooperation on immigration issues, German interior minister Wolfgang Schauble said on Thursday that the fight to stem illegal immigration would require cooperation with the countries that the immigrants stemmed from and travelled through. He said it would only be possible to tackle illegal immigration effectively if there were more resources and funding, and stated that greater efforts were required to integrate immigrants, particularly Muslims. The German Presidency will be focussing on beefing up Europol's joint investigation teams and the funding of Fronted.
Schauble said that while it had to be accepted that Islam was now a part of Germany, Muslims also had to accept the fundamental rights of European society. He said that the sharing of information and benchmarking across the EU were useful to highlight the integration deficit in many countries, which should be discussed as widely as possible at European level with representatives of Muslim communities. Asked about the wearing of the veil, Schauble said his own view was that this was an individual decision and had nothing to do with politics. The same did not apply, he said, to the burqa (covering the whole body so only the eyes can be seen), which prevented communication. We want to co-exist and not isolate ourselves from one another, he added. Schauble said he backed the idea mooted by Franco Frattini of promoting the training of imams (Muslim religious leaders) in Europe. Schauble, a CDU-CSU politician, cautioned that it would not be the EU that actually organised the training, but the EU did want the training to go ahead in Europe because it wanted imams to play a part in integration.
To this end, the European Commission is planning to take inspiration from the 'Islam and Integration' action plan launched by the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The plan, recently presented to Franco Frattini, consists of a platform of various Muslim organisations and experts to organise dialogue among public authorities and Muslim and non-Muslim communities. It also trains imams and organises public information meetings on Islam and integration. Although the European Commission is not planning to fund the training of imams directly, it does have €825 million earmarked for 2007-2013 to fund inter-cultural platforms of this nature. (ab)