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Migrant Crisis and Refugee Quotas Divide E.U. Ministers E.U. Ministers Fail to Agree on Plan to Require Sharing of Migrants
(about 3 hours later)
BRUSSELS — European Union ministers attending an emergency session were at loggerheads on Monday over a comprehensive, coordinated approach to managing the huge number of migrants crossing member countries’ southern and eastern borders. BRUSSELS — Even as three more countries followed Germany in introducing border checks to control a flood of migrants, the European Union on Monday failed to agree on a modest plan that would force individual countries to take in a share of some of the hundreds of thousands now seeking asylum in Europe.
But they did reach agreement on a limited, first step. Gathering in Brussels for an emergency meeting, interior ministers from across Europe agreed to share 40,000 migrants sheltering in Greece and Italy, but to share them only on a voluntary basis, a watered-down version of a plan first announced in May.
The home affairs ministers from member states gathered here after Germany reversed course over the weekend and imposed temporary border restrictions, cutting off rail service from Austria and instituting spot checks on cars. But as the fractious meeting stretched into the evening, there seemed little prospect that ministers would endorse a new plan put forward last week by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, for a program of resettlement for a further 120,000 asylum seekers that would be compulsory for member countries.
The ministers did agree on Monday to steps to relocate 40,000 migrants from Greece and Italy, two front-line countries that have faced the initial burden of an influx of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe. But a lasting solution for relocating as many as 160,000 migrants to European Union countries farther north and west looked elusive as the meeting dragged into the evening. Diplomats said ministers had agreed in principle to this number but not on how it would be divided up among different countries. Discussion on that will resume next month. In a sign of the disharmony caused by Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, a senior diplomat said, the ministers had decided not to issue a joint final statement and asked Luxembourg, which currently holds a rotating presidency, to issue a summary of their conclusions in its own name.
Countries, particularly those in Central and Eastern Europe, continued to balk at plans backed by Berlin and the European Union authorities to accept fixed quotas of migrants in response to Europe’s largest humanitarian crisis in decades. The haggling in Brussels over the distribution of 160,000 migrants — a small part of the total — played out as Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands introduced border controls on Monday, following a decision by Germany on Sunday to set up checks on its own southwestern frontier and halt train traffic with Austria.
The decision by Germany to tighten the borders, which appeared to be a signal to other nations in the 28-member bloc that it could soon reach its limits in dealing with the crisis unless they show a greater willingness to cooperate, added a new level of urgency to the meeting. The reintroduction of border controls, described as a temporary measure to restore order to an often chaotic flow of migrants, was the most serious challenge in years to Europe’s cherished system of passport-free travel across much of the Continent.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive agency, has called for the quota system to be compulsory. The 26 European countries that are party to the so-called Schengen Agreement, a cornerstone of European integration that enshrines open borders but also allows for temporary controls for security reasons, have in the past periodically reinstated checks but never because of pressures from migration.
Europe, Mr. Juncker said in his State of the Union address last week, had a moral duty and an economic interest to give migrants new homes. The reintroduction of controls also threatened to create an unpredictable new patchwork of complications and potentially risky obstacles for migrants seeking to make their way through Europe to preferred destinations in places like Germany or Sweden, where benefits are greater and the processing of asylum applications moves faster.
Mr. Juncker’s proposal included relocating 40,000 migrants who have arrived in Greece and Italy, and who are covered by the plan given approval on Monday, and a second plan to take in a further 120,000 migrants who have arrived in those two countries as well as in Hungary. The desperation to reach such countries, even as border controls have been tightened, has increasingly driven migrants and refugees into the hands of unscrupulous smugglers, leading recently to the deaths of 71 migrants who suffocated in the back of a truck along a highway in Austria.
Eastern and Central European countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic have rejected any effort by Brussels to require that they accept asylum seekers. In Hungary, the authorities said that a near-record 5,353 migrants had crossed into the country from Serbia before noon on Monday — even as Budapest continued to try to seal off that border, which is being reinforced with the construction of a 109-mile fence made with razor wire.
Arriving at the meeting, Robert Kalinak, the Slovak interior minister, made clear his opposition to Mr. Juncker’s plan. The border measures raised pressure on the emergency meeting in Brussels to close the deep fissures that have opened up among European nations over how to handle the migrant crisis. A further note of urgency was added by appeals in Brussels made by the aunt of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey this month. Photographs of the dead child shocked European public opinion and helped trigger an outpouring of sympathy for migrants.
“This proposal is not solving the problem,” Mr. Kalinak told reporters. Rather than focusing on transit countries where migrants do not want to stay, it would be far better “to help Germany and find some solution how we help the Western countries which are at the end of the route of the refugees, the migrants,” he said. “Europe has not done enough. Germany took the biggest number and now it has too many,” Tima Kurdi, a resident of Canada, said during a visit Monday to Brussels for talks with officials. “Every country has to take responsibility. Aylan’s death was, I believe, a message from God to the world to wake up and do something about these refugees. Everybody is closing the door in their face.”
The Swedes took the opposite approach before the meeting, underlining the deep gulf in Europe over how to respond to the crisis, with Morgan Johansson, the Swedish minister for justice and migration, calling for binding targets. All the same, ministers from several East and Central European countries remained steadfast in their opposition to the compulsory distribution of migrants proposed last week by Mr. Juncker.
“We really need to share this responsibility, with solidarity,” Mr. Johansson said. “This proposal is not solving the problem,” Robert Kalinak, the Slovak interior minister, told reporters. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Baltic States have all voiced deep reservations about taking in refugees, arguing that they have no tradition of offering refuge to people of different cultures; that their economies cannot sustain the influx; and that most of the migrants want to live in richer and more welcoming places like Germany and Scandinavia.
“I’m not sure we’ll get all the way today,” he said, adding that he hoped ministers would at least make “a couple of steps.” In an effort to win over opponents of the plan, Germany, Sweden and other nations agreed to demands for tougher measures against migrants who fail to qualify as refugees, including their swift return to countries deemed safe.
Mr. Johansson said the goal should be helping migrants by offering language training and other means “to make them part of our nations.” In a speech on Wednesday to the European Parliament, Mr. Juncker presented the migrant crisis as a test of Europe’s ability to take common action and asked that interior ministers move swiftly to endorse his relocation plan at their Monday meeting. Voicing doubts that a voluntary program would work, he said: “This has to be done in a compulsory way.”
He also took a swipe at Hungary’s leadership for “trying to scare people off” by using “very vivid rhetoric,” including bluntly telling migrants not to go there. As the strength of opposition to this became apparent, however, the European Commission omitted the remark from an official transcript of the speech.
The Hungarian response, he suggested, was an inappropriate reaction to the war in Syria, which has led to the “worst humanitarian crisis in our time.” Luis Morago, campaign director for Avaaz, a refugee advocacy group, said that Europe’s reluctance to adopt mandatory quotas did not necessarily emasculate the relocation effort, but that “in practice the only way of getting many European governments to do anything is if it is compulsory.” Europe’s halting response to the migrant crisis, he said, had so far been “disappointing and contradictory.”
Although countries like Germany have said they want to do as much as possible to accommodate migrants who have fled war and persecution and reached Europe, others like Hungary say that quotas only serve to encourage ever larger numbers of people to pay people-smugglers and to risk their lives on treacherous journeys. Elizabeth Collett, director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, said Europe’s difficulties in finding a common approach reflected the flaws in a shaky European system whose rules and institutions are “only half built” and whose ultimate goal — a fully integrated European state or simply a collaborative jumble of distinct nation states — “has never been decided.”
Countries that oppose the quotas have also argued that they have no tradition of offering refuge to people of different cultures, that their economies cannot sustain the influx, and that most of the migrants want to live in richer and more welcoming places. On migration, she added, “there is simply no consensus. Some countries accept the idea that Europe is a place for asylum seekers but others don’t think this is their responsibility.”
There is also disagreement among European Union governments about which non-European countries should be included on a list of so-called safe countries — nations like Albania, Serbia and Turkey that are judged to be free of persecution, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, indiscriminate violence and armed conflict. The European Union’s mixed signals have exasperated nations that share a border with the bloc and that have become transit routes for ever growing numbers of Syrians, Afghans and others seeking entry into Europe.
Migrants from safe countries would be assessed more quickly, and those that do not qualify for asylum would then be returned to their home countries. Citing Hungary’s decision to make unauthorized entry into the country a criminal offense starting on Tuesday, Serbia said it would set up reception centers in the north of the country and pleaded for the European Union, of which it is not a member, to take action. About 3,500 migrants were expected to pass through Serbia on Monday, most of them hoping to continue to Germany or Austria.
The scale of the influx means that the crisis is one of the most serious the European Union has ever faced. Negotiating a common solution is likely to take months, if not years. While Berlin said the controls along the German-Austrian border were only a temporary, emergency measure, the restrictions, a response to the strain on local communities, signaled that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance toward the migrants was encountering domestic resistance.
The “proposals on the table for Monday’s so-called emergency meeting fall dangerously short of addressing gaps and ensuring protection and dignity for those in need,” Iverna McGowan, the acting director of the European Institutions Office for Amnesty International, warned on Monday. “There is no order, there is no system, and in a country governed by the rule of law, that is a cause for concern,” Horst Seehofer, the governor of Bavaria, a deeply conservative state in the south, told reporters on Sunday.
About 2,800 people have died this year while trying to reach Europe, according to Amnesty International, which noted that some migrants had also been pushed back from the European Union’s external borders. “We need better controls in general, because we have determined that in recent days, many of those on the move are really not refugees,” Joachim Herrmann, the Bavarian interior minister, told a local television station.
As Monday’s meeting got underway, the ministers reached the agreement to relocate 40,000 migrants from Greece and Italy. Officials in Eastern and Central Europe, including Hungary, have made similar arguments as the battled to abort Mr. Juncker’s plans for the swift distribution of 160,000 migrants.
This will be “a temporary and exceptional relocation mechanism over two years from the front-line member states Italy and Greece to other member states,” the European Union said in a statement. “It will apply to persons in clear need of international protection who have arrived or are arriving on the territory of those member states” from Aug. 15 until Sept. 16, 2017. “A mandatory quota for the E.U.-wide relocation of migrants is unlikely to be achieved quickly, if at all,” said Carsten Nickel, a senior vice president at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk consultancy.
Other European Union member states accepting migrants from Greece and Italy would only need to do so voluntarily. But the decision “is an important political message,” said Jean Asselborn, the minister of immigration and asylum of Luxembourg, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. About 50 police officers, wearing riot gear and equipped with gas canisters, converged Monday afternoon on the train tracks linking the villages of Roszke, Hungary, and Horgos, Serbia, which thousands of migrants had used to cross in recent days. An official in a bright yellow jacket turned away migrants seeking to enter Hungary.
“Now that the Council is discussing an additional emergency relocation proposal, it is very important to see that the first mechanism is set up and begins to produce its effects,” said Mr. Asselborn, who was referring to discussions about relocating another 120,000 migrants.
The system to relocate the first 40,000 migrants could begin in the coming days. Most of those qualifying for relocation are expected to be Syrians and Eritreans.
The plan to relocate a further 120,000 migrants could win a political endorsement from a majority of ministers on Monday. But a final decision on that plan, and a deal on a permanent system to redistribute migrants during future crises, could still require a meeting of European Union leaders later in the month.
“A mandatory quota for the E.U.-wide relocation of migrants is unlikely to be achieved quickly, if at all,” Carsten Nickel, a senior vice president at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk consultancy, said on Monday. “Any eventual agreement is unlikely to greatly involve the commission and will instead be reached between member states, ensuring the supremacy of capitals rather than E.U. institutions over this core issue of national sovereignty,” he added, referring to the European Commission led by Mr. Juncker.
Last week, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, which represents national leaders and organizes summit meetings, said that the home affairs ministers needed to reach “a solution based on consensus and genuine solidarity.”
“Without such a decision,” he said Friday from Cyprus, “I will have to call an emergency meeting of the European Council still in September.”