EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson interviewed after a video conference of EU Home Ministers in Brussels 14/12/2020 Photo: Portal/Francois Walschaerts EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson interviewed after a video conference of EU Home Ministers in Brussels 14/12/2020 Photo: Portal/Francois Walschaerts
European Union (EU) ministers this Thursday (8) reached a consensus on how to share responsibility for caring for immigrants and refugees, after 12 hours of negotiations that resulted in Italy and Greece signing the agreement that Block had eluded them for nearly a decade.
Home ministers from the 27strong bloc sealed the deal in hopes of ending years of division since 2015, when more than a million people most of them before the war in Syria crossed the Mediterranean into the European Union.
Sweden had presented compromise proposals on two key texts of the migration pact. One of them envisages a binding but “flexible” European solidarity.
Under this proposal, bloc states would be obliged to take in a certain number of asylum seekers who come under migratory pressure to another EU country, or if this is not possible, to make a financial contribution.
This compensation amounts to around 20,000 euros (R$106,217 at current prices) for each nonrelocated asylum seeker. The money goes into a fund managed by Brussels.
The other text adopted obliges member states to put in place an accelerated procedure to examine the asylum applications of a certain number of migrants who statistically have less chance of obtaining refugee status.
The aim is to facilitate the deportation of these migrants to their countries of origin or transit.
Nancy Faeser from Germany hailed the agreement as “historic”. The Union’s top immigration official said it was a winwin for all EU member states.
“This is great, a great achievement showing that it is possible to work together on immigration. We are much stronger when we work together,” said Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson.
The admission of immigrants has become an increasingly controversial issue since 2015.
Unable to agree on how to share the burden, EU countries have generally focused on containing arrivals. UN data shows fewer than 160,000 people crossed the sea last year, equivalent to a block of 500 million people.
Almost 2,500 people died or are missing on dangerous crossings during the same period.