BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU governments started talks on Thursday on a proposed European Commission overhaul of broken migration rules, trying to resolve years of bitter divisions and provide a better welcome for refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa.
The video-conference of EU interior ministers is the first chance to exchange views on the scheme proposed by the EU executive last month, and especially on its most sensitive part which de facto obliges each EU country to host some refugees.
Poland and Hungary are dead set against that, even though under the Commission proposal the EU would pay a country 10,000 euros ($11,750) per adult taken in.
The EU’s reluctant eastern members, the richer northern states where many of the newcomers aspire to live and the Mediterranean-shore countries where they mainly arrive have been clashing over where to locate people since the 2015 migration crisis showed existing EU migration rules were inadequate.
In 2015, more than a million people made it to EU shores, overwhelming security and welfare networks, and stirring far-right sentiment. The EU now receives up to 1.5 million net new foreigners coming legally to live and work per year and only 140,000 asylum seekers arrive illegally.
“Our aim is for Europe to focus on those who need protection, which includes those fleeing the civil war of course,” German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters.
“But we also want order which means that we won’t in future be letting in so many people who don’t in reality need protection,” he said before the video-conference started.
Under the Commission’s latest proposal, EU countries would be obliged to help each other under the new idea of “mandatory solidarity” by either accepting migrants, sponsoring their return to their countries of origin or offering material assistance on the ground in arrival countries.
But if an EU country were under major migration pressure, the Commission wants a crisis mechanism to oblige other EU governments to take people in or send them back.
If a migrant could not be sent back within eight months — which national migration experts and some EU officials admit is tight — the EU country in charge of the return process would be forced to take in the migrant — anathema to the easterners.
Germany is keen to reach a deal among EU governments and institutions on the new migration regime by the end of the year, but the process might take longer.
(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski; Additional reporting by Thomas Escritt in Berlin; Editing by Alison Williams)
