When almost fifty European leaders met in the Spanish city of Granada on Thursday to discuss shared challenges, there was one piece of good news at least. The announcement 24 hours earlier that agreement had finally been reached on a new, coordinated EU approach to migration was warmly welcomed by most of those present.
After years of wrangling and stalemate between the 27 EU member states, the new deal requires greater burden-sharing when there is a surge in irregular migration. The mechanism is intended to take pressure off states on the union’s south and south-east periphery which currently serve as arrival points for the vast majority of migrants, record numbers of whom have been attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year.
The agreement sets out how, when countries such as Italy experience such a surge, they can call on fellow members for help, which may be given in the form of financial assistance or by accepting some migrants themselves.
New regulations also permit faster processing of asylum applications at times of crisis, along with stricter rules on detaining and keeping migrants at the border crossing where they arrive. Those whose applications are rejected will be deported more swiftly.
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Despite strong opposition from Poland and Hungary, whose governments wanted a much stricter approach to migrants, the deal has sufficient support to pass under qualified majority voting. The issue of crisis management represents the final piece of a complex jigsaw that makes up the long-delayed migration and asylum pact which European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen believes can now be concluded before next year’s European Parliament elections.
The question of how to manage large numbers of irregular migrants arriving at its borders has posed a profound challenge to core EU principles of solidarity and free movement. Agreements with countries such as Turkey and Tunisia have drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations that Europe is breaching fundamental values by off-shoring its humanitarian responsibilities to authoritarian regimes. A disagreement between Germany and Italy over the role of search-and-rescue NGOs in the Mediterranean was the last hurdle to be surmounted before the agreement was reached.
Alarmed by political dysfunction in Washington, divided over the pace of EU expansion and facing another grim winter of war in Ukraine, European leaders can console themselves that progress has been made on one of the most sensitive subjects on their respective domestic political agendas. With general elections imminent in Poland and the Netherlands, and a changing of the guard due after next summer’s European elections, this week’s agreement is especially timely.