The EU on Wednesday took its first steps toward a fundamental reform of its defective migration policy, which has heaped huge pressure on some nations like Greece as more than a million migrants and refugees surged into the continent over the past year.
However, almost immediately, the East-West fissure within the EU over migration was laid bare. Nations like Germany and Greece welcomed the plan by the EU’s executive commission that seeks to amend the current principle under which the first nation where a migrant arrives is forced to process their asylum request and temporarily shelter them.
The Czech Republic, which chairs the Visegrad group of four eastern EU nations, voiced opposition to any plan that would mean each EU nation has to take a set number of asylum seekers.
Photo: AP
The commission is proposing a reform in which a “distribution key” to spread asylum applicants around the EU would be a key element, either as part of a whole new system or as an addition to the current one.
However, efforts to distribute the recent influx of refugees already caused serious friction with many EU nations.
Migratory pressures over the past year drove a stream of hundreds of thousands of people up from the Mediterranean toward northern nations like Germany and Sweden in chaotic circumstances, which turned EU rules into a mockery.
“The current crisis has shown the present system is not working,” EU Vice President Frans Timmermans said, adding small nations like Greece could never have dealt with such a task to process so many asylum claims. “This is neither fair nor sustainable.”
The Commission said in a document to EU institutions that “significant structural weaknesses and shortcomings” in the current system were rife, which placed “a disproportionate responsibility” on some nations, while others, mostly eastern European members, sought to shield their countries from having to carry much of the refugee burden.
In the face of such shortcomings, nations like Greece and Germany quickly welcomed the commission’s proposals. Showing the sensitivity of the issue though, the commission said its proposals offered only “options” on which the member states and the EU parliamentary groups should build further.
Timmermans said that a logical extension of common EU policies, like a central European system to deal with asylum claims was still too controversial.
“In political terms, it is not realistic to talk about this today,” he said.
The bloc’s inefficient rules on migration along with its slow decisionmaking once the refugee crisis hit last year have been fodder for critics who portray the EU as an inefficient, outmoded institution.
Even French President Francois Hollande, a staunch defender of the EU, was on Wednesday forced to admit that the bloc’s biggest problem is its slow decisionmaking process — whether in the financial crisis, the fight against terrorism or a common response to the refugee crisis.
In an interview in the German daily Bild, Hollande said “in the end [Europe] always succeeds in finding a solution ... but we have to pay a high price for the lost time.”
More than 53,000 refugees and migrants have been stranded in Greece since Austria and the Balkan nations north of Greece — Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia — closed their land borders last month.
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