Migration crisis: bid for united EU response fraying over quota demands

By The Guardian

Europe’s fragmented attempts to get to grips with its worst ever migration crisis are disintegrating into a slanging match between national capitals ahead of what is shaping up to be a major clash between eastern and western Europe over a common response.

Berlin has won applause for seizing the moral high ground and opening its doors unconditionally to Syrian refugees but Austria and Hungary attacked it on Tuesday for stoking chaos at their railway stations, on their roads and at their borders as thousands of people seek transit to Germany.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, rejected the criticism and stepped up her campaign to pressure reluctant EU partners into relieving the load on Germanyand taking part in a more equitable system of sharing refugees across the EU.

“We must push through uniform European asylum policies,” she said. With Germany expecting to process 800,000 asylum applications this year – more than four times the figure for 2014 and more than the rest of the EU combined – Merkel insisted that there had to be a fairer distribution. “The criteria must be discussed,” she said.

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, stood alongside Merkel in Berlin as she spoke, but he rejected the German pressure for a new system of binding quotas for refugees spread across the EU. “Some countries don’t want refugees,” he said. “You can’t force anyone [to take them].”

“It’s not the time to be pointing fingers at each other,” said Natasha Bertaud, the European commission’s spokeswoman on immigration.

The difficulties of forging a consensus were apparent, however, from the increasingly vicious blame game played by EU governments. Berlin and Brussels are pushing strongly for a more equitable and coordinated system to replace the current patchwork of incoherent and inconsistent national systems.

There is no pan-European policy and most powers over immigration rest with national governments, but Hungaryand the Czech Republic have blamed the crisis squarely on Europe, and both reject common policy proposals from Brussels.

Both countries are talking about deploying their armed forces on their borders to keep out people fleeing war and persecution, many of them bona fide refugees.

János Lázár, an aide to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said: “It is the policies of the past 10 years which have led to this situation. The leftist approach of the European commission, according to which anybody should be allowed into the territory of the European Union. The EU has failed to manage the situation and the problem is the EU itself, which is incapable of protecting its own borders.”

The Czech president, Miloš Zeman, made similar comments on Monday, and the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, echoed the Kremlin’s criticism of western Europe by blaming it for the civil wars in Syria and Libya and the ensuing refugee crisis.

Central European countries are seeking to minimise the number of newcomers they host. The prime ministers of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are to meet on Friday to seek a common position of defiance towards the pressure from Berlin and Brussels, especially on the question of obligatory quotas.

“We will see who refuses and who does not,” Merkel said last Friday. Poland has already diluted its resistance to Berlin’s demands and said it would take in more refugees. The country’s nationalist right is tipped to win elections next month, however, and the centre-right government in Warsaw sees its scope for concessions as limited during an election campaign.

Hungary and Austria, both countries of passage for the thousands of people clamouring to reach Germany, sought explanations from Berlin but the former partners in the Hapsburg empire reserved their vitriol for each other.

Werner Faymann, the Austrian chancellor, joined French-led criticism of Orbán in Budapest and talked of vetoing EU funding for Hungary. The Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, accused Faymann of lying and summoned the Austrian ambassador for a dressing down.

“We reject all statements which are based on lies and are capable of provoking anger and aggressive situations such as the one that the Austrian chancellor made this time,” Szijjártó said.

Orbán is expected in Brussels on Thursday for talks with Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission.

With Germany’s support, Brussels is to set out a more ambitious agenda next week when Juncker delivers his first state of the union speech to the European parliament.

He will reiterate demands for mandatory refugee quotas, rejected by central European countries, the Baltic states and Spain, and propose a new permanent mechanism that would trigger the automatic distribution of refugees across Europe in an emergency.

EU interior and justice ministers will then scrap over the proposals on 14 September. Juncker is opposed on the issue by Poland’s Donald Tusk, the other EU president who chairs summits such as the June session on immigration, which lasted until 3.30am with tempers frayed, insults traded and results absent.

EU governments have agreed to take in 32,000 refugees who have arrived in Italy and Greece on a voluntary basis over the next two years, barely a third of those now arriving in Europe monthly.

Merkel, who describes the migration crisis as the biggest of her decade in office, has said that national border controls may have to be reimposed across Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone unless a more concerted approach can be agreed.

Senior officials from across the EU are meeting in Brussels this week to try to agree on a common list of “safe countries of origin”, meaning that migrants arriving from countries on the list can be deported more quickly.

This would ease the pressure on Germany, because more than 40% of those currently arriving are from the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Albania, where the risk of political persecution is deemed to be small.

Current arrangements are confusing, with some EU countries running their own lists of safe countries of origin, others not, and not a single country appearing on all lists.

The issue is sensitive and politically divisive and whether safe country lists are effective is arguable. Germany lists Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia as safe countries, but plenty of asylum seekers are arriving from those countries. Its list does not include Kosovo or Albania, but Berlin wants those countries on the common EU list being negotiated by the European commission. France, however, dropped Kosovo from its safe list last year.

Including a country on the safe list invalidate asylum seeking. “Asylum rights are always individual. Claims have to be examined individually,” said Bertaud. “A safe country of origin list fast-tracks the procedure, based on the assumption they would not qualify for asylum.”