The European Commission is drafting a Green Paper on a new common asylum policy, scheduled to be issued next year and come into force by 2010.
Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini gave this information in reply to a parliamentary question submitted by Nationalist MEP David Casa on the issue of illegal immigration and the need to revisit the EU's asylum procedure rules, called Dublin II.
The commissioner did not go into the issue of whether a special Justice Ministers Council meeting should be held in Malta on this subject, as requested in a resolution adopted by the European Parliament last April. He only said such meetings are normally set by the presidency and not by the Commission.
Mr Casa asked Mr Frattini to state what action has been taken or is planned to be taken vis-à-vis the revision of the Dublin II rules and the introduction of a fair mechanism for sharing responsibilities for asylum seekers among member states.
In its resolution, the European Parliament had called upon the Commission to revise the Dublin rules by considering a change to the principle that an asylum application has to be dealt with by the first member state in which it is made. According to the resolution, this is putting an intolerable burden on the countries situated in the south of the EU, such as Malta.
Mr Frattini said that the revision of the Dublin II rules has to be taken in the context of the work being done by the commission to put in place new common asylum rules for the entire EU.
"The Commission considers the evaluation of the Dublin system to be the first step in launching the debate on the future of the Common European Asylum Policy, which will be the object of a comprehensive Green Paper to be issued in 2007," he said.
He said the Green Paper will be followed by a debate, in which Parliament will have ample opportunities to participate and which will set out the roadmap for the Commission's work towards the achievement of the Common European Asylum System by 2010.
Addressing the need for more burden sharing among member states, Mr Frattini recalled that the Commission recently adopted an amendment to the European Refugee Fund in order to provide emergency financial assistance to member states that are confronted with particularly heavy pressures at their borders due to sudden arrivals of large numbers of migrants.
He said that, in addition, the Commission has also proposed to support burden sharing operations consisting of the transfer of beneficiaries of international protection from one member state to another which provides them with the same form of protection they obtained in the first member state.