Malta will try to broker a deal on migration when it takes over the EU presidency, but Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela believes elections in the Netherlands and France could complicate matters. Kurt Sansone reports.
Dutch voters head to the polls in March amid European unease over the increasing popularity of Geert Wilders’s anti-immigrant party.
A recent poll has put Mr Wilders’s PVV ahead with a quarter of the vote and, though it is unlikely he will end up prime minister, due to Dutch coalition politics, the outcome could galvanise other anti-immigrant parties.
The Dutch election will be followed in April by the presidential race in France, where far-right Front National candidate Marin Le Pen is favoured to go into the second round run-off.
Both elections will happen in the middle of Malta’s EU presidency, when at the top of the agenda will be an attempt to broker a deal to reform the Dublin rules on immigration. Getting all 27 member states to agree on the reforms is already hard, according to Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela, and doing so in the face of the far-right’s advance has only complicated matters.
“Domestic politics plays an important part in the EU decision-making process, as governments keep an eye on national issues,” Mr Abela said yesterday at an informal briefing for journalists ahead of Malta taking over the presidency on January 1.
The European Council set June 2017 as a deadline for the Dublin reforms. Few doubt this will be possible, given the deep divisions within the EU on how to deal with migration. The Dublin rules lay down that the country in which asylum seekers first set foot is responsible for them. The EU’s frontier countries, like Malta, have long called for reforms to allow migrant relocations from border States to the rest of the EU.
The discourse is one rooted in solidarity but, on the eastern flank, the EU’s border countries insist on a hardline approach that advocates the closure of borders for migrants. The Visegrad Four – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – have also rejected the mandatory migrant relocation system proposed by the European Commission last year and introduced after a qualified majority vote in the Council.
But despite the difficulties, Mr Abela refuses to start the journey believing it is impossible to achieve a common European asylum system.
“It is hard, but I am an optimist by nature,” he said, adding member states had to water down their respective positions to be able to find common ground.
He said Malta’s role would be to bring the different sides together and help generate new ideas.
However, he acknowledged that at the heart of the conundrum was the radically different perspectives of those who believe in solidarity and those who want an EU that tries to shut out the problem.
Mr Abela articulated the dilemma: “Even those who advocate closing land borders have no answer when confronted with the impossibility of closing the EU southern sea border. What do you do with an overloaded, tattered boat? Do you force it to return and if so, to where? Do you risk the lives of the people on board?”
Mr Abela said strengthening the EU’s external borders was important, even from a security perspective, but on its own this was not enough. Malta would argue for a multifaceted approach to the crisis, he added.
Mr Abela said that the EU needed a clear policy and strategy on how to handle migrants when they entered the EU.
Those deserving protected status must receive it, while an effective mechanism should be in place to ensure that those who are ineligible for protection be returned to their country.
“The EU must also focus on the external dimension by engaging with countries of origin and transit,” Mr Abela said. To this end, Malta will host a meeting of senior officials as a follow-up to the 2015 Valletta migration summit, to determine progress on the outcomes.
But the reform to the Dublin regulations is expected to absorb the lion’s share of the agenda, and development on it will, in part, determine the successful outcome or otherwise in other areas.
The Home Affairs Ministry will be leading the talks on reforms to the common asylum procedures and the criteria for assessing asylum applications. Malta’s presidency will also deal with changes to the cross-border migrant finger-printing mechanism, the voluntary resettlement of migrants from non-EU countries and the European Asylum Support Office.
While migration is expected to dominate the agenda, security will also feature as Europe grapples with the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany.
“There is more cooperation at the level of information sharing, and the idea is to strengthen this, apart from discussions on enhanced border checks for passengers travelling to the European Union without the need for a visa,” Mr Abela said.
As the EU’s smallest country prepares to take over the presidency at a critical juncture, Mr Abela reiterated Malta’s pledge to be an honest broker.
kurt.sansone@timesofmalta.com