EU forces through refugee relocation deal

EU forces through refugee relocation deal

By JACOPO BARIGAZZI AND MAÏA DE LA BAUME 9/21/15, 7:19 PM CET Updated 9/22/15, 5:56 PM CET

http://www.politico.eu/article/eu-tries-to-unblock-refugee-migrants-relocation-deal-crisis/

EU countries on Tuesday approved a controversial proposal to relocate 120,000 refugees across the continent, forcing the measure through over the objection of several member states that opposed mandatory criteria for the acceptance of asylum-seekers.

Diplomatic sources confirmed that four member states voted against the proposal — Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Czech Republic — but that other countries had the votes to get it passed under EU rules that allow certain decisions to be made in the absence of a consensus. Finland abstained, the sources said.

Interior ministers from the EU’s 28 countries held an emergency meeting in Brussels Tuesday to approve the proposal, which was left on the table after they failed to agree on it a week ago. Diplomats spent most of Monday and part of Tuesday trying to break the impasse between countries over whether the plan would set mandatory quotas for accepting refugees.

Eastern European countries remained opposed to any plan that included a requirement from Brussels to take in asylum-seekers.

The pressure to move on the refugee issue has been building throughout the week, leading ministers to use a political “nuclear option” of qualified majority voting to adopt the relocation scheme.

On Wednesday, EU leaders will gather for an emergency summit on the migration issue, and officials pushed to have the relocation dispute settled before then so they can focus on other issues, such as tighter border controls and funding for Turkey, where many refugees are currently being housed in camps.

According to official sources, the agreement adopted Tuesday would relocate the 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy, but not from Hungary as originally proposed by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech earlier this month.

Juncker made another appeal during a presentation on the EU budget Tuesday, calling on countries to show “solidarity” in dealing with the crisis.

“Closing borders is not a solution,” Juncker said. “If you have survived bombing and a rubber boat in the Mediterranean, a fence will not stop you.”

Members of the Visegrad group, which brings together leaders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, met Monday afternoon in Prague to discuss “possible solutions” to the refugee crisis. After the meeting the countries reiterated their opposition to mandatory quotas.

But Poland shifted away from the other Visegrad countries, indicating it was ready to take refugees though it remained opposed to mandatory quotas imposed by the Commission.

“We are prepared to accept migrants but not quotas,” said Poland’s interior minister, Teresa Piotrowska, before the meeting in Brussels Tuesday.

In the end Poland voted with the majority in favor of the proposal.

Front-line states

The scope of the problem was underlined this week when the EU released new figures showing that more than 210,000 asylum-seekers applied for protection in the Union in the second quarter of 2015. Those numbers do not take into account the thousands of refugees now arriving daily at Europe’s borders.

Both of the Commission proposals now left out of the new agreement — the inclusion of Hungary in the relocation plan and the criteria for distributing refugees across member states — have faced fierce resistance in recent weeks.

After changing its line several times, Hungary refused to be considered as a front-line state for the arrival of refugees, along with Italy and Greece, and in draft conclusions being worked on Monday by the Council it had been removed from the plan.

The original Commission proposal was to relocate 54,000 migrants from Hungary, 50,400 from Greece and 15,600 from Italy. The problem for diplomats is what to do with the 54,000 refugees that Hungary is now refusing to relocate.

“Voluntary”

An earlier agreement on the Commission’s proposal from May to relocate 40,000 refugees required a delicate compromise making the target figure mandatory but the method for reaching it voluntary. That less-ambitious agreement was finalized last week by ministers, but the headline goal has still not been reached.

EU officials are trying to avoid a similar problem on this larger plan. To sidestep the mandatory versus voluntary problem, this time the number of refugees each country will take in will not be imposed by the Commission but rather agreed by the various member states.

It would not possible for a member state to completely opt out of taking refugees

“Numbers have been roughly agreed with each member state, so [sovereignty] is safe,” the EU diplomat said.

“The fact that in many cases the number of refugees to take in is very similar to the numbers proposed by the Commission is a pure coincidence,” noted another EU diplomat.

Many of the larger questions will have to be dealt with over dinner Wednesday by EU heads of state and government. The leaders will hold an “informal” summit to discuss how to tackle migration at its roots, in Turkey and Syria, and how to ensure control of the EU external borders.

Authors:

Jacopo Barigazzi  and Maïa de La Baume