EU ministers fail to agree on migrant quotas

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/16/eu-ministers-fail-to-agree-on-migrant-quotas

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European Union governments have failed to reach agreement on how to divide up the tens of thousands of refugees pouring into southern Italy from north Africa, increasing Rome’s fears that it will be left to cope with the Mediterranean migrant crisis.

Interior ministers from the 28 member states met in Luxembourg and shelved any decisions on proposals from Brussels for a new system of sharing the refugee load through a mandatory quotas system. The proposals put forward by the European commission last month were modest, calling for the distribution among EU countries of 40,000 asylum seekers arriving in Italy and Greece.

“There’s a divergence of views,” said Latvia’s interior minister, Rihards Kozlovskis, who chaired the meeting. “There’s no common view on voluntary and mandatory.”

The proposed policy would have made refugee-sharing mandatory, but opponents, mainly in eastern Europe, want the scheme left voluntary.

Related: Italy threatens to give Schengen visas to migrants as EU ministers meet

There is tension between Italy on the one hand and France and Austria – which have closed their borders to stop migrants moving north – on the other. As the ministers met in Luxembourg, hundreds of migrants were camped out on the French-Italian border, unable to cross out of Italy.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner in charge of the issue, sought to put a brave face on the results of a meeting that included up to five hours of argument and produced no agreement. “In my eyes, it was a success,” he said. “There is no room for criticism.”

The immigration issue, one of the most toxic in the politics of many of the countries concerned, will now be passed up to an EU summit in Brussels next week. The summit will order further discussions at the end of July.

This week Italy threatened retaliatory measures against its EU partners unless they agreed to quotas, warning that it would give arriving migrants three-month temporary visas that would allow them to travel further in the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone.

Related: The Journey: A refugee's odyssey from Syria to Sweden

The French and German interior ministers came out in favour of the quotas system but linked their backing to commitments from Rome that it would register and fingerprint arriving migrants so they could be sent back there under EU rules that stipulate that an asylum seeker must lodge a claim in the first EU country he or she enters.

Paris and Berlin also want to “Europeanise” the registration and deportation of migrants, handing the powers to EU agencies, because they do not trust the Italian authorities to carry out the proper procedures.

The European commission is in charge of policing EU observance of the rules governing the passport-free Schengen zone. Avramopoulos suggested that Austria and France were breaking the rules. “Member states cannot introduce systematic border checks at internal borders,” he said.

An estimated 60,000 people have risked the Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy this year. According to Save the Children, 10 rescue operations took place at sea on Tuesday.