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Mediterranean migrants: EU leaders agree voluntary intake after heated talks Mediterranean migrants: EU leaders agree voluntary intake after heated talks
(about 1 hour later)
After arguing into the early hours over how to handle the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, European leaders have agreed a compromise plan to share out the care of people fleeing war and poverty in north Africa and the Middle East. The national leaders of Europe have engaged in one of their most bitter rows in years over how to respond to the influx of refugees from across the Mediterranean after they scrapped plans for a quota system to share out the resettlement.
The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, said on Friday the agreement for a voluntary scheme was reached to show “solidarity with frontline countries”. However, there would be no mandatory quotas for countries. The meeting descended into name-calling and recrimination as the leaders fought over a modest scheme to share the intake of 60,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum-seekers between their countries over two years.
The deal will resettle 40,000 asylum seekers now in Italy and Greece, and another 20,000 people currently outside the EU who the French president, François Hollande, said were “essentially from Syria and Iraq, who at this moment are in camps and who will be reinstalled in Europe”. A summit that also had to grapple with the Greek debt crisis and the British referendum on whether to stay in the EU was almost entirely consumed until 3am on Friday by the blazing row over a scheme criticised by humanitarian agencies as risibly inadequate for the scale of the problem.
Angela Merkel told reporters the meeting involved “a very intensive debate”, and described the migrant crisis as the biggest challenge she had seen in European affairs since becoming German chancellor. Italy and Lithuania traded barbed insults, while two EU presidents – Donald Tusk, chairing the summit, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European commission – fought for hours over the wording of the summit statement which could not be agreed.
Proposals for mandatory quotas were fought off by Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and others who argued that their ex-communist economies still lacked the capacity to cope. Bulgaria and Hungary, which has seen thousands of migrants cross its land border, secured exemptions, while the UK has opted out of the scheme.
Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said the plan was modest.
As did the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, adding that at one point in the meeting he had told EU leaders “I don’t give a damn” about objections to the plan’s underlying methodology.
“We have to find out if the system works. It doesn’t matter if it is voluntary or mandatory, it is whether it can help 60,000 refugees,” Juncker told a news conference.
He had been hoping to set a precedent for Europe-wide action that limited national opt-outs.
During the summit dinner, Renzi rebuked his fellow leaders for their reluctance to support a plan that was meant as an emergency response to the tragedy of 2,000 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean but has been overshadowed by divisions, particularly in eastern Europe.
“If we think Europe is only about budgets, it is not the Europe we thought of in 1957 in Rome,” Renzi said, referring to the European Union’s founding treaty.
Related: David Cameron set to go to referendum without EU ratifying treaty changesRelated: David Cameron set to go to referendum without EU ratifying treaty changes
The summit became so tense that a speech by the British prime minister, David Cameron, served as an interlude to cool tempers, with his much-awaited pitch for a new EU deal for the UK reduced to barely 10 minutes. The Lithuanian president, Dalia Grybauskaite, told Matteo Renzi, the prime minister of Italy, which is on the frontline of the refugee crisis, that she had no intention of contributing to any solution. Renzi accused the government chiefs of wasting time and was said to reply: “If this is your idea of Europe, you can keep it”.
The mood was a long way from the unity showm by EU ministers in April immediately after the deaths of 900 migrants off the Libyan coast in a single weekend. Friday morning’s Italian newspapers spoke of a “savage” battle between the two countries.
While the political deal was a breakthrough, hurdles remain to its implementation. The criteria to share migrants among member states must be decided by the end of July. Such factors as the size of a member state’s economy and population must be considered. Juncker emerged bleary-eyed just after 3am to attack Tusk, saying: “I protest against this working method. It’s a modest effort, let’s be honest.”
“There’s much, much more argument to come,” said one senior EU diplomat. “I don’t yet see the full way forward.” His proposal for a system of mandatory quotas for countries to take in migrants had come under sustained assault for hours. “I don’t give a damn,” he said.
The debate has also strained the EU’s commitment to its Schengen agreement on passport-free travel. “If there was a conflict between us, it would never be presented as a conflict,” he said of the row with Tusk.
During the week, Austria threatened to reimpose controls on its border, while Hungary and Britain called for more security around the French port of Calais. Britain and Spain want a greater focus on returning migrants to their countries of origin. Angela Merkel of Germany, which takes in much more asylum seekers than any other country, described the immigration crisis “as the biggest challenge I have seen in European affairs in my time as chancellor”.
During those 10 years, Merkel has been the key figure in five years of eurozone crisis and is the lead European trying to deal with Russia’s military partition of Ukraine.
Britain stayed on the sidelines of the dispute since it is not part of the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone, has opted out of EU asylum policy and has said it will not take part in the proposed refugee-sharing scheme.
The bad-tempered exchanges are certain to be repeated as EU interior ministers attempt over the next month to agree on how to share out the resettlement of the 60,000 asylum seekers.
Effectively telling Brussels to mind its own business on the politically toxic issue of immigration, the summit buried calls for a more equitable system across the 28 countries.
“We have no consensus among member states on mandatory quotas for migrants,” Tusk said. “It will take much time to build a new European consensus on migration.”
Instead of discussing measures for a more organised and equitable system of taking people in, the leaders focused on how to keep people out and deport those who get in.
“First and foremost, we need to contain illegal migration and this should be our priority. All those who are not legitimate asylum seekers will have no guarantee that they will stay in Europe,’’ Tusk said.
Faced with an influx of migrants through the Balkans, Hungary has started building a four-metre-high wire fence along its border with Serbia, while Italy is struggling to cope with the the tens of thousands reaching its southern shores after risking their lives in unseaworthy vessels to cross the Mediterranean from Libya.
Of the proposed quota system, a senior EU official said: “The idea that Brussels imposes quotas is not going to fly. It will never gather the support of the member states.”
But Juncker refused to accept the rejection and fought on for hours. The argument focused on the form of words used to describe the decisions taken by the summit, with Tusk adding the word “voluntary” to the text and seeking to change the decision-taking basis for the policy from one of majority voting to unanimity, meaning that any country would have a veto on the issue.
The decision to distribute 40,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece and to take in 20,000 Syrians and Eritreans who have fled their countries but not reached the EU was a token gesture to Italy.
The summit defined the 40,000 scheme as “temporary and exceptional”, to be spread over two years. It will have little impact on the overall numbers, given that more than 600,000 people sought asylum in the EU last year. The figures for new arrivals this year are much higher.
According to the latest figures from Frontex, the EU’s border agency, the number of migrants arriving at the EU’s external borders has risen by a factor of 2.5 this year compared with 2014, from 61,500 to 153,000. The numbers coming through the Balkans were nearly nine times higher than last year.
Mediterranean crossings last month were 29% up on April, and there has been a five-fold increase so far this year in those using the eastern Mediterranean route compared with the same period in 2014.
The number of first-time asylum seekers in the EU in the first quarter of 2015 almost doubled compared with the first three months of 2014, according to Eurostat, the EU statistics agency. About 40% of the claims were lodged in Germany compared with only 4% in Britain.
The summit decided on a battery of measures aimed at speeding up asylum processing and expelling those whose claims are turned down.
EU development funds, trade agreements and diplomatic pressure are to be deployed as leverage on the migrants’ countries of origin to encourage them to sign readmission agreements with the EU.
“All tools shall be mobilised to promote readmission,” the summit decided.
“Structured border zones” or “hotspots” are also to be established in southern Italy to quarantine those arriving, fingerprint and register them and expedite the deportation of those deemed to be illegal or economic migrants.
European police and border agencies are to be granted new powers for implementing policies that until now have been the sole remit of national authorities.
Syrians and Eritreans arriving in the EU in high numbers can seldom be repatriated because of the risk to their lives at home. Their treatment in the asylum regime will remain unchanged and their cases will remain in the relevant national systems as before.
Britain’s refusal to take part has been widely criticised. Peter Sutherland, the UN secretary general’s special representative for international migration, told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that it is unfair that Britain should be able to opt out. This has forced countries like Greece and Italy to take on an “unfair burden of responsibility”.
Sutherland said: “All member states, incidentally, should participate in the voluntary settlement, including Britain, Ireland and Denmark. There is absolutely no reason, if this is not compulsory, why they should feel they can opt out. This is a question basically of European solidarity. Why should Greece and Italy in particular take this unfair burden of responsibility for people who are refugees escaping from persecution?”
The UN special representative acknowledged that Britain has been playing a role by rescuing some of the refugees in the Mediterranean. Asked if that was not enough Sutherland said: “Absolutely not, sure. There is a massive degree of support from other countries in regard to helping people in the Mediterranean and saving lives. This is a separate issue. It is the issue of the fair distribution amongst the EU on the basis of solidarity of people who are refugees.”
Sutherland also said that EU leaders should have agreed a compulsory programme on the resettlement of migrants. He said of the overnight dispute.
“I do believe it is a mistake. It could have been more ambitious. There is no doubt that it reflects limited progress nonetheless. We can only judge it when we see what countries come up with by way of voluntary agreement by foot of what has been agreed in Brussels.”