Status: 09.12.2021 4:51 a.m.
Adhering to EU core values, but not exposing yourself to blackmail: The EU interior ministers are meeting today on how to deal with migrants at the border correctly. The next crisis – in the English Channel – is already looming.
The pressure on the eastern EU border remains high: As can be read from a template for the meeting of EU interior ministers, there are still around 7,000 migrants in Belarus who want to enter the European Union. In the Interior Council, the focus today should therefore also be on the effectiveness of the measures taken so far.
For example, Lithuania and Latvia have asked Frontex for support, says Piotr Switalski, spokesman for the EU Border Guard Agency: “Frontex permanent reserve officials help their colleagues with border controls, border surveillance and the registration, identification and control of irregular migrants who cross the border illegally exceed.”
In addition, the EU Commission has now given Poland, Lithuania and Latvia the opportunity to weaken some asylum rules for six months. According to Article 78 paragraph three of the EU Treaty, it is legally possible to take such emergency measures in an exceptional situation, says the EU Vice-President Margaritis Schinas, who is responsible for migration: “As an EU we are a family, and if a member is attacked, then we stand all other members ready to help. “
Johansson sees EU core values ”not affected”
The federal states now have 20 weeks to register those arriving and examine the asylum applications. During this time, the refugees are de facto imprisoned, say critics, who speak of a weakening of the right to asylum.
An accusation that EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson does not want to accept: “We are following the mandate of the Council of 27 countries that we should make proposals to be more flexible in protecting the external borders. And that is what we are doing – but the right to apply for asylum, not to be refused, the right to protection, to legal assistance, to a fair asylum procedure, remains unaffected. So the fundamental values are not touched. “
Brussels accuses Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of using the people at the border to destabilize the EU. Similar to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he opened the border with Greece in 2020, or when Morocco smuggled thousands of people into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta last May in order to blackmail the EU.
Agreement with Great Britain called for
Against this background, border protection and the fight against human smugglers are of the greatest importance, says Lena Düpont, migration policy spokeswoman for the CDU / CSU group in the EU Parliament: “There is a delicate balance to which the European Union must find an answer. At the same time, it is But it also makes it clear that we cannot allow the answer to be dictated by dictators at our external borders who cynically instrumentalize people. “
While the past few weeks in Brussels have focused on the situation at the EU’s external borders in the east, another crisis is looming on France’s north coast. Since January around 26,000 people have tried to cross the English Channel from France to the UK. In the year before the pandemic, there were just 2,000 people. As a reaction, there is now a law in the British Parliament that is supposed to stipulate tough countermeasures up to so-called pushbacks. The law would also make it much more difficult for people entering the country illegally to seek asylum in the UK.
From the perspective of London, France and the EU would be obliged to take the migrants back in. There you see it differently and advocate an EU agreement with all countries on the English Channel. From a Brussels perspective, however, Great Britain would have to create legal migration routes and take in more refugees than before. A solution to this dispute is not yet in sight.