EU’s refugees

Final days of the EU’s refugee strategy

Ultimatums keep coming, and so do the refugees.

By Jacopo Barigazzi

No matter how hard the EU tries to resuscitate efforts to deal with the refugee crisis, its strategy is flatlining. And after months of missed deadlines, mixed messages, pushback from countries, and resistance from refugees themselves, European officials are now grasping desperately for alternatives.

Warnings and ultimatums have been issued and lines drawn on a regular basis. The latest came this week from European Council President Donald Tusk, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who all said the final countdown clock is ticking on whether the EU can achieve its migration goals.

“We have no more than two months to get things under control,” Tusk told the European Parliament, warning that unless the EU could make progress on the issue the Schengen passport-free zone would fail. “The March European Council will be the last moment to see if our strategy works. If it doesn’t, we will face grave consequences such as the collapse of Schengen.”

If the past few months are any guide, the newest deadline won’t drastically hasten implementation of the plan or suddenly produce the outcomes that EU officials have long promised. Rather, it could give reluctant national leaders an incentive to wait out what looks like the final days of a deeply unpopular policy.

Similar warnings had been issued several times, dating back to an emergency EU summit held last April. But in his new warning, Tusk turned up the pressure Tuesday, citing data showing that over the Christmas period more than 2,o00 new asylum-seekers arrived in Europe every day.

It’s not even clear whether the key EU leaders agree on the March summit as the latest important deadline.

Rutte, whose country holds the EU Council presidency for the next six months, told the Parliament Wednesday those numbers “aren’t sustainable. We are running out of time. We need a sharp reduction in the coming six to eight weeks.”

Juncker said Wednesday he found it “personally rather painful” to have to keep talking about how measures agreed by the EU had not been implemented.

But it’s not even clear whether the key EU leaders agree on the March summit as the latest important deadline.

Juncker indicated he wants a solution in February, and said he would ask Tusk to prolong next month’s meeting of EU leaders so that they would have enough time to tackle migration. The EU’s migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, also told MEPs that “the goal is to see tangible results by the European Council in February.”

Mixed messages

Juncker and Tusk have rarely been on the same page throughout this crisis, and have often been at odds over how to proceed. While the Commission president has long pushed for EU countries to take in refugees, Tusk has focused on the need to better protect the bloc’s borders.

Regardless of the timeline, few see any chance to fix in one or two months what has been failing since May, when the agenda on migration was presented by the Commission.

“From now until March, we could see an extremely limited development on the hotspots, possibly also on the money for Turkey and maybe a few more people will be relocated,” said Alexandra Stiglmayer, a senior policy analyst at the European Stability Initiative, a think tank. She was referring to the centers set up in Greece and Italy by the EU to identify refugees and to the €3 billion pledge to Turkey that is now gridlocked because of grievances of the Italian government.

“So far all the attempts to find an EU solution have failed,” Stiglmayer said.

The data show no mercy in illustrating the depth of that failure.

Only 331 refugees out 0f 160,000 have been relocated so far under the Commission’s plan. On Tuesday, Italy opened its third hotspot, in Sicily, out of the six it should have operational by now. In Greece, only one out five planned hotspots, in the island of Lesbos, is fully functioning.

That didn’t stop Avramopoulous from assuring in an interview Tuesday with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that those hotspots in Greece and Italy will be ready in four weeks at the latest. He also warned of increased refugee flows in the coming months.

All these problems have triggered a blame game: The Commission faults member countries for not backing their summit promises with actions; national leaders blame the Commission for insisting on proposals — such as the unquestioning acceptance of asylum-seekers — that they consider politically impossible to implement.

The Commission’s plans were further knocked off course by unforeseeable events such as the Paris terrorist attacks and the New Year’s Eve alleged mass sexual assault in Cologne, Germany. In the Cologne incident, accusations that asylum-seekers were among the perpetrators have intensified an already volatile debate on refugee policy in Germany.

Policy trial balloons

In Brussels, officials are floating ideas to save what can be saved. The most recent proposal under discussion is a revision or even scrapping of an EU policy requiring that asylum claims be processed by the country in which a refugee first arrives — a regulation that strains the frontline countries of Greece and Italy.

The Commission is expected to put forward a review of the so-called Dublin Regulation in March but EU officials insisted that any discussion of the plans at this point is pure speculation.

It is “very premature to talk about what the proposal will be,” a Commission spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday. Analysts and officials warn that it would take months, possibly years, to find an agreement on such a revision.

For now the attention is mainly on a Commission proposal for a European Border and Coast Guard

“In the past it has taken a long time to negotiate even small changes in asylum legislation,” said Elizabeth Collett, director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, a think tank.

Also in the pipeline is a proposal on legal migration aimed at reducing asylum-seekers’ reliance on irregular routes. But for now the attention is mainly on a Commission proposal for a European Border and Coast Guard, which EU leaders agreed to in principle in December. But it won’t receive formal approval until this summer — well after the make-or-break deadlines spotlighted this week.

“The Parliament and Council need to rapidly conclude negotiations” on the proposal, the Commission said last week.

One diplomat was cautiously optimistic about that process: “I expect it to be approved but with significant changes, so it will not be easy.”

Missed deadlines

Other deadlines have already fallen by the wayside, as the Commission admits.

EU countries agreed last summer to resettle from outside the bloc a total of 22,504 people by the end of next year.

“Based on the information received from member states and associated states, 5,331 persons were due to be resettled under the scheme in 2015,” the Commission said last week. “At the end of last year, the Commission has received confirmation that only 779 had been effectively resettled.”

In October, a meeting of leaders along the Western Balkan refugee route agreed for “Greece to increase reception capacity to 30,000 places by the end of the year.”

But Greece is still in the process of setting up 11,500 reception places, well below the target.

In June, countries agreed to relocate 40,000 refugees to countries across the bloc. By the end of July, they had agreed only on how to relocate 2,256.

“We are almost there,” said Avramopolous. “The remaining 8,000 will be allocated by the end of this year, by December.”

Six months later the figures have not changed.