Abela faces hard slog to bring Dublin impasse to an end

Home Affairs minister Carmelo Abela has a tall order before him. As Malta takes the presidency of the European Union, it will be his job to attempt to forge a deal between all the bloc’s 28 member states on reforming the maligned ‘Dublin system’ – a regulation notorious for its shortcoming in major crises.

The core principle under the current Dublin regime is that the responsibility for examining an asylum claim lies with the first member state accessed by the applicant. Frontier states say the rules punish them since they are expected to process the claims of anyone intercepted at their end of the EU border. For a country like tiny Malta, but also for Mediterranean states like Italy, Greece and Spain, this is a problem.

But Abela’s role as an honest broker for the whole of the EU has a far greater deal of obstacles.

At the negotiating table itself, the Visegrad Four – the alliance of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – are not keen on Dublin, even though Hungary itself was one of the countries to first take on the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Joining NATO and the EU fulfilled the original purpose of the alliance created in 1993. Then migration, and Angela Merkel’s open-door policy, brought the countries back together: they want a stricter protection of EU borders, closing them off if possible, and oppose relocation of migrants.

But closing off borders is not as straightforward as it seems, Carmelo Abela points out, pointing out that the EU border is a shared one, and that such policies affect all member states.

This is one of the substantial drawbacks of the European Union. Its member states can be quick to punish errant countries whose deficits are higher than 3% of their GDP. But when it comes to creating a common asylum system and laying down one standard for the reception and relocation of refugees or migrants without documentation, at times 28 different yardsticks, and expectations, apply.

Abela says that even northern member states, such as Sweden – which attracts large waves of migration attracted by its social security benefits – are now coming to terms with the need to reform Dublin. Forcing border countries to process and host asylum seekers does not nothing to prevent secondary movement, where migrants tend to advance further north as they seek a promised land for economic security and protection from persecution.

That is why another seven legislative proposals are part of an entire package of immigration reform: they comprise resettlement rules from non-EU countries, the reform of the European Asylum Support Office, changing fingerprinting rules – the so called Eurodac system, as well as laying down common rules on procedures, qualification for protection, reception conditions, and finally a ‘blue card’ for migrants on similar lines as the United States’ green card.

Abela’s goal for the next six months will be to hammer out an understanding on the Dublin reform. It is easier said than done: much of the background work is done by technical officers in Malta and in Brussels, and then they have to negotiate with a delegation from the European Parliament, before going back to the Council to further come out with a common text.

“The presidency’s role is to bring together common positions, but also generate new ideas and foster better understanding through bilateral meetings,” Abela says.

Abela: EU countries ‘coming to terms with need to reform Dublin’

But the Maltese minister also faces another challenge, this time coming from a surge of the hard and far right that is set to influence mainstream politicians seeking to outbid parties with harrowing anti-immigrant sentiment. France and Germany have elections in 2017: the former will certainly see the Front National’s Marine Le Pen in the final run-off, while in the latter Angela Merkel is set to pay the consequences of her open-door policy as far-right groupings like AfD are set to influence the political agenda.

“There is a danger with the far-right, and it is a matter of concern for the EU. A lot of what happens will depend on the attitudes of politicians, and general elections do have an effect on what ‘the national interest’ is at the moment. Domestic concerns do play an important role, as well as public opinion, on the positions taken by ministers,” Abela admits.

That makes the business of seeking cooperation on a common text for the Dublin regulation’s reform even harder.

Maltese MEP Roberta Metsola is leading the negotiations on the Dublin regulation for the European People’s Party in the European Parliament. She said that negotiations between political groups are ongoing and that a draft report should be ready by February before discussions with the Council start.

“I am under no illusions. This will be one of the hardest files to find a compromise on. It is a dossier that has become toxic and means that responsibility is disproportionately placed on States in the Mediterranean. The status quo is simply not good enough.

“Some Member States are happy to leave the situation as it is. I am not. The time for soft ‘Brussels-style’ baby steps is no longer an option. We must overhaul the system or we risk providing more fuel for populists in Malta and across Europe. That said, I hope that under the Maltese Presidency we will see real progress, and in the Parliament we are ready to work with everyone to fix the current system.”

The climate inside the EU is itself gloomy. Although all EU member states pledged to take in migrants from Greece and Italy under the solidarity mechanism over a two-year period, Abela is the first to admit to the lack of enthusiasm among certain member states.

In 2015, home affairs ministers agreed to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, to assist the two countries in dealing with the pressures of the refugee crisis. Malta has so far taken 70 from its pledge of 131. Austria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia have taken little or none. France and the Netherlands offered to take fewer people than the number they had agreed to under the relocation scheme.

Indeed the V4 states are fighting the European Commission’s relocation mechanism in the European Court of Justice, after they were outvoted in the EU council in September 2015 on the second relocation scheme. Rising anti-refugee sentiment will undermine the commitment of countries to take this flexible arrangement further.

“In some cases it is technical and practical problems: the difficulties of trying to identify the migrants, even finding them to simply relocate them, for one, but also because member states know they cannot prevent their secondary movement once they are relocated. So there has been a lack of enthusiasm,” Abela says.

In June, Abela will be tasked to take full stock of the ad hoc Solidarity Mechanism. For a bloc of 28 member states that is happy to punish errant countries with deficits higher than 3% of their GDP, forcing them to live by their pledges to take in Syrian refugees should be a simple task. But the political sensitivity on the issue of migration across Europe – Abela himself told an Italian parliamentary committee this year that there was little appetite for solidarity – means the EU’s refugee policy will muddling around for some form of agreement on a watered-down proposal.