White smoke at the last chance meeting held today in Luxembourg to move forward with the European migration pact before the next elections to the European Parliament. After almost twelve hours of meeting, the Interior Ministers of the Twenty-seven reached an important political agreement on Thursday to reform the European asylum policy, broken since the migratory wave of 2015.
The compromise reached "is a good balance between solidarity and responsibility (...) based on European values and international law", celebrated the Swedish Minister of Immigration, Maria Malmer Stenergard, after completing the final stretch of eight years of discussions, three of them involved intense legislative work. Now that the negotiating position of the member states has been established, talks with the European Parliament can be opened. Spain, which on July 1 will take over from Sweden in the rotating presidency of the Council, has proposed closing the agreement during the second half of this year.
The principle of agreement closed this Thursday contemplates that, when the reception capacity of a country is overwhelmed, an emergency framework will be activated that will lead to establishing a procedure for the distribution of migrants, so that the rest of the partners take charge from these people.
If they do not want to cooperate, as is the case with countries such as Hungary or Poland, which do not accept immigrants from Africa or Asia, they must pay 20,000 euros per person or offer material assistance for a similar amount in order to assume at least part of the financial cost of this policy. "All solidarity options have the same value and respect the different needs of each country," emphasized the representative of Sweden, where the Executive governs with the support of the extreme right.
The other regulation that received the approval of the ministers opens the way to examine by an accelerated procedure the applications for asylum of people from certain countries and who, in principle, have few possibilities of receiving international protection, so that they do not pass months or years in community territory waiting for their cases to be resolved. “There will be a rapid evaluation of the cases at the border and people who do not have the right to asylum will be helped to return. This will prevent abuse and help those who do need it," said Stenergard.
The vote against the initial commitment of countries with very strong positions in the migration debate, such as Austria, Poland or Hungary, which called for more drastic measures such as the processing of files only in third countries, and, on the other, Italy, Greece and Malta, the member states on the front line of the border, forced the extension of the negotiation. In the end, only Hungary and Poland voted against the agreement; Bulgaria, Malta, Slovakia and Lithuania abstained.
Spain, unlike its Mediterranean neighbours, endorsed the main lines of the Swedish commitment from the beginning. "The agreement has to be yes or yes today," Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in the first public debate on the proposal. Otherwise, "we would be bound to fail in our commitment to Parliament and to the accepted roadmap," he said, referring to the roadmap agreed with the European Parliament with a view to ratifying the interinstitutional agreement before the European elections on June 9, 2024.
