Following a long day of negotiations between the bloc’s home affairs ministers on Thursday, June 8th, the Council finally agreed on two key files of the EU’s flagship Migration Pact: border procedures and migrant relocations. The breakthrough was announced by Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, representing the Council’s Swedish presidency.
As expected, the controversial migrant redistribution scheme was adopted, but only because the decision did not need a unanimous vote, only a qualified majority, meaning that no member state could have vetoed it individually.
Only two countries persisted in their objections until the end: Poland and Hungary. Five others abstained, including the two other Visegrad countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia), as well as Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Malta.
“Brussels is abusing its power,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wrote on Facebook after the announcement. “They want to turn Hungary into an immigrant country by force,” the PM added.
As we wrote before the meeting, the “mandatory solidarity” mechanism was the thorniest issue in the files. It’s also the likely reason the meeting went on for hours after it was supposed to end.
Central European countries were particularly opposed to the idea of the “voluntary” choice between accepting refugees from frontline member states or paying a €22,000 financial contribution for each migrant turned down, as per the initial figure the Swedish presidency has floated for the past week.
While Minister Stenergard hailed the agreement as a historical breakthrough that demonstrates the unity of EU countries, the fact that the measure was pushed through against the will of seven member states suggests the contrary. But, according to the Commission, this is how EU lawmaking works.
“This is not unique to this policy area. It’s actually quite often that when we come to a conclusion with a new legislation, some member states are very much against [it],” Ylva Johansson, the EU’s Home Affairs Commissioner, commented on the division in the Council. She continued:
But when the new legislation comes into force, of course, it’s applicable to all member states. And, at the end of the day, it’s the Commission that is the guardian of the treaty to make sure that the legislation is implemented and complied with.”
A few compromises have indeed been secured, but not all of them are meaningful, of course. Despite several countries pushing for an amount as low as ten thousand euros, the final figure that a member state will have to pay for not accepting refugees was agreed at closer to the original proposal, €20,000 per migrant.
Another revision to the mandatory solidarity was that the financial contributions no longer go directly to those member states who do take in more migrants but will be pooled first into a central, Union-level instrument, Stenergard said. Further details of this instrument will be negotiated in the coming weeks, but some of the funds could be used for managing the external dimensions of migration.
Furthermore, the minister specified that migrants would be redistributed to member states before their asylum was granted; and that the annual quota for redistribution will be set first at 30,000 migrants, which could then be raised gradually over a three years, to 120,000.
“The forced relocation of illegal immigrants … was probably the stupidest idea to ever come out of Brussels,” Polish MEP Kosma Złotowski (a member of the conservative parties’ recently formed migration policy group) told The European Conservative last week after Poland announced that it will oppose the mechanism.
According to him, the migrant quotas are an “absurd and oppressive solution” to both member states and asylum seekers, who will end up in countries they didn’t want to go to. “Let [Western Europe] do these social experiments on their own citizens, with their own money, and leave Poland out of it,” Złotowski added.
Regarding border procedures, Italy and other frontline states seemed to have gotten what they wanted, although the waters are still a bit murky in the Central Mediterranean. The possibility of returning migrants to third countries that are deemed safe is still in the package as long as two requirements are met.
First, the migrants need to have a connection to the country they would be returned to (having family there, for instance), and second, it must be a place that is considered safe under international law.
The list of safe countries will be decided at a later date, Stenergard said, while the criteria for acceptable connections between the migrants and destination countries could be, in theory, decided by the member states who facilitate the returns, but the EU will also have to approve them.
Whether transit countries (where migrants stayed for an extended period) qualify as a state to which the migrants have a sufficient connection will be decided during further negotiations. Italy is likely to push for them to be included, as it would solve Rome’s immediate problem with returns to Libya.
