Ministers
back refugee processing centers in the Balkans
Italy,
Greece and other frontline countries urged to speed up relocation
schemes.
By JACOPO BARIGAZZI
11/9/15, 10:48 PM CET Updated 11/9/15, 11:05 PM CET
EU interior
ministers told Italy and Greece to speed up the process of relocating
refugees, and agreed to set up processing centers in the Western
Balkans to try to ease the pressure on the EU’s internal and
external borders.
“All participating
member states will speed up the relocation process,” said a
statement after a meeting of interior ministers in Brussels on
Monday. “In parallel, Italy and Greece will substantially
accelerate the preparatory steps necessary for relocation.”
So far the
relocation effort has been painfully slow. Of the 160,000 refugees
who were supposed to have been moved out of Italy and Greece by last
week, fewer than 150 had been relocated elsewhere in the EU.
Monday’s talks
took place at the beginning of a week in which two meetings on
migration will dominate the agenda. A gathering of European and
African leaders on Wednesday and Thursday in Malta will be followed
by meeting of European heads of state on Thursday, also on the tiny
Mediterranean country.
As well as trying to
speed up relocation, ministers reached a political agreement on
processing centers along the Western Balkans migratory route. The
meeting conclusions call for exploring “the concept of processing
centers in countries where the hotspot approach has not been
implemented” in order ”to organize access to international
protection” and for returning those who do not qualify for
protection.
Jean Asselborn, the
European affairs and foreign affairs minister of Luxembourg, which
holds the rotating presidency of the Council, stressed after the
talks that one of the reasons for setting up processing centers is
because Greece, which has often been accused of letting refugees
leave the country before being identified, cannot cope with all the
migrants arriving in the country. “More people arrived in the
[Greek island of] Lesbos in October than in the whole last year,”
he said, adding that “we cannot ask one country to deal with all
these people.”
The plan is to set
up centers in EU and non-EU countries in the Balkans but not in
Turkey, an EU official explained. The details, including their exact
location, will be discussed in the coming weeks.
The gravity of the
situation was illustrated by Asselborn before the meeting: “The
European Union can break apart. This can go incredibly fast, when
isolation instead of solidarity becomes the rule internally and
externally … We may have only a couple of months,” he told the
DPA news agency.
Processing centers
could also be useful if the migration crisis escalates: “In a worst
case scenario, if Germany or others should shut the borders, these
centers would allow refugees to be identified and to have a orderly
process also in this kind of situation,” said a EU diplomat.
Another tough
scenario for diplomats is if countries such as Austria and Germany
follow the lead of Sweden, which last week asked the European
Commission to take refugees away instead of taking them in as part of
the relocation scheme. “I do not rule it out but we will not talk
about that today,” Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Austria’s interior
minister, told journalists before the meeting when asked if Vienna
would follow the Swedish example.
Despite the tension,
the debate was said to have been smoother than at previous meetings:
“Today we discussed in a much better atmosphere compared to the
previous ones,” said the migration commissioner, Dimitris
Avramopoulos.
Part of the reason,
a diplomat said, is that the Luxembourg presidency set aside some of
the more controversial aspects, such as speeding up a proposal for a
permanent relocation system, as put forward by the Commission.
Another aspect left
off the table on Monday was the functioning of the Schengen area of
passport-free travel. That will be discussed at a meeting of interior
ministers in December.
“On paper everyone
agrees that we have to defend Schengen and external borders but then
many member states have different views of what it actually means,”
said another diplomat.
In a speech in
Berlin on Monday, European Council President Donald Tusk outlined
what protection of external borders means to him: “External borders
do not necessarily mean walls. It is a combination of infrastructure
and complex policy that requires a wise use of soft, economic and
hard power, for example against smugglers, and in order to enforce
our rules and laws”
Authors:
Jacopo Barigazzi
5
reasons relocating refugees is a nightmare
Political
and logistical problems threaten the Commission’s plans.
By JACOPO BARIGAZZI
11/9/15, 5:30 AM CET
EU leaders begin a
week of high-profile meetings on the migration crisis with diplomats
increasingly concerned that Europe’s plans to relocate refugees
across the bloc could fall apart.
Interior ministers
meet Monday, followed by a gathering of European and African leaders
in Malta on Wednesday and Thursday — with a last-minute,
“extraordinary” summit of EU heads of state and government tacked
onto the agenda. The focus is on implementing measures already agreed
to, from relocation of asylum-seekers to increased border control and
humanitarian aid.
For most of the
summer, political obstacles prevented real movement on migration
until countries agreed in September to relocate 160,000 refugees over
the next two years from Italy and Greece. But those problems — with
several countries opposed to mandatory quotas on the acceptance of
asylum-seekers — were only the beginning.
The relocation
effort has been painfully slow. Fewer than 150 refugees out of the
160,000 total moved out of Italy and Greece as of last week.
Meanwhile, thousands of new refugees arrive in Europe every day.
The political
roadblocks remain, but now logistical complications threaten the EU’s
migration agenda. Many countries claim they are simply not prepared
to handle the influx.
Sweden on Wednesday
asked to change its status in the EU’s refugee relocation scheme so
that it will not have to take in additional migrants, but rather will
send them to other countries. Other countries seeing record numbers
of refugees, including Germany and Austria, could follow Sweden’s
lead.
“I am not worried
about the slow pace of relocation, I am much more worried for the
possibility of a domino effect,” said an EU senior diplomat.
Sweden’s migration
agency projected last month that 190,000 refugees could arrive this
year, more than twice as many as expected. Sweden was supposed to
take in 3,728 refugees from Greece and Italy who now, if the request
is approved, will have to be sent to other member states.
The fear is that if
too many other countries want to send refugees away and too few want
to take them in, a domino effect could collapse the whole process,
which is already proving a nightmare to implement.
“I have not heard
the Germans or the Austrians saying that they want to do the same
thing,” said another EU diplomat, “but obviously if it happens we
would need to re-design almost the whole system.”
Here are five ways
the relocation plan has gone wrong:
Slow pace
So far 105
asylum-seekers out of 39,600 have been relocated from Italy and 30
out of 66,400 from Greece. To speed up progress and hit the target of
relocating more than 100,000 refugees from Italy and Greece over the
next two years, 140 refugees need to be boarding a plane every day.
That is currently
nowhere near the case, and the way things are going it looks
difficult to achieve anytime soon, despite constant urging from EU
officials.
“I want to see
dozens of such flights in the next days, to all member states,
sending a signal to the smugglers and traffickers that we can cut
them out and to the refugees that safe avenues exist,” European
Parliament President Martin Schulz said Thursday after a two-day
visit to Greece.
Missed targets
Even as the actual
relocations move slowly, EU countries have still not finalized their
agreement on who will take all of them.
The 160,000 total
figure is the sum of two different relocation plans: one, decided in
June, for 40,000 refugees, and another, decided in September, for a
further 120,000. But while the European Commission keeps talking
about the total number, it’s worth remembering that counties have
yet to meet its first target of relocating 40,000 refugees.
Countries have only
agreed to take a total of 32,256 refugees from that number. A final
decision on that is expected by the end of the year, EU officials
said.
Facilities
bottleneck
Countries have been
slow to fulfill the agreements they made to accept asylum-seekers,
meaning there are not enough places for refugees to be relocated to.
So far 14 member states have made available just over 3,500 places
for refugees out of 160,000, according to the European Commission.
Bulgaria has done
the most on this score: So far it has made available 1,302 places,
fulfilling its pledge. But France has prepared just 900 out of 19,694
places, and Germany only 10 out of 27,536 additional refugees it is
supposed to take from Italy and Greece as part of the relocation
scheme. Among Baltic countries, only Lithuania so far has pledged 40
places.
“Luckily
relocation is moving slowly, otherwise we would run out of places
very soon,” joked one EU official.
For refugees, a lack
of trust
Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker last month told members of the European
Parliament that Luxembourg is “quite willing” to welcome refugees
but “it seems to me that very many of the refugees are actually not
keen to come to Luxembourg.”
Officials working in
the field say there is an even bigger problem than convincing
refugees to go to countries where they may not want to go: winning
their trust.
“Refugees are
people who went through awful experiences and they are reluctant to
board the plane because they are afraid that we will offload them in
some African or Middle East countries,” said an EU official who
works in Italy. “To convince them often we have to involve the
local communities of migrants in the nations where they will be
relocated.”
Offers of help
rejected
In the world of
refugee-relocation politics, strange things happen.
Kosovo, which has
just taken its first official steps toward joining the EU, in
September offered to take in 2,000 to 3,000 refugees from Europe. Yet
two months later, Kosovo Foreign Minister Hashim Thaçi told POLITICO
the country had not gotten any answer from the Commission but still
stands ready to help.
“Kosovo was a
country of origin of migrants but not anymore,” Thaçi said, adding
that according to Eurostat, the EU statistics bureau, “more than
15,000 Kosovars have returned home this year, a majority of which
came back voluntarily.”
Authors:
Jacopo Barigazzi
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