European justice ministers clashed on Thursday over how to solve Europe's spiraling migration crisis, with countries arguing over who was to blame and who should foot the bill, The International Herald Tribune reported.
Among the issues discussed were using the EU's 1 billion euro a year ($1.3 billion) solidarity fund, which usually covers natural disasters, to help Spain, Italy and Malta cope with arrivals of boatloads of illegal immigrants, and using biometric identification for migrants, who often purposefully arrive without documents.
More than 23,000 migrants have flooded into the Canary Islands of Spain so far this year, and more than 6,000 have reached Malta since 2002 - the per-capita equivalent of a million new people arriving in Germany.
Addressing the officials at the start of a two-day meeting in Tampere, Finland, Spain's justice minister, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, appealed to the EU to provide money and reinforcements for joint EU patrols of the Mediterranean sea and Africa's Atlantic coast. So far, the 25 countries of the EU have contributed two patrol boats, one airplane and a handful of experts, The International Herald Tribune added. But his call for a collective approach to the migration crisis - echoed by Malta, Greece and Italy - was drowned out by sniping from other member states.
Austria's justice minister, Karin Gastinger, said Madrid had made the situation worse by granting amnesty to 600,000 illegal migrants last year. López Aguilar shot back that the root causes of the migration - hunger, illness, poverty and despair - were to blame.
Spain's call for EU financial help also came under criticism. Germany's interior minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said it was wrong for countries like Spain to ask other countries for handouts.
In turn, Bloomberg reported that European ministers agreed to Spanish and Italian requests that they share some of the burden of illegal immigrants arriving on their shores, even as Spain came under criticism for regularizing many illegal aliens. It was agreed that the EU as a whole should negotiate agreements with African countries where the migrants are from, rather than leave it up to the receiving countries alone.
The arguments underscored the difficulty the bloc is having in reaching a common approach to the crisis, in part because the EU's migration policies are hampered by divergent regulations. The International Herald Tribune further added the justice ministers also appeared deadlocked over calls by the European Commission to shift the power for cross-border policing and counterterrorism from national governments to the EU to strengthen the fight against terrorism.
Under current EU rules, all decisions related to justice policy - including border controls, visa rules and the exchange of police information - must be approved unanimously by member countries. This has led to delays of up to three years in passing anti-terror legislation. Only one country, Spain, has enforced rules requiring countries to create joint investigative teams to track terrorists, while only 5 countries of 25 have implemented proposals to combat child pornography.
But appeals to member states to drop their national vetoes over judicial policies have encountered stiff resistance from countries including Germany, Britain, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands, which are reluctant to cede power over what they view as the domain of sovereign states.
The justice ministers also debated new anti-terror measures on Thursday, including proposals to combat the recruitment of youth into radical religious groups.
According to Bloomberg, under the terms proposed on Thursday, the EU would defray some of the costs of processing clandestine immigrants as they arrived, but the receiving country would be responsible for the migrant and would have to accept their return should they illegally make it to another EU country. The amount of money wasn't discussed, the Finnish Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Thursday's meeting was a so-called informal meeting, meaning its proposals must be defined and agreed at formal meetings of EU ministers. Interior and justice ministers hold their next formal meeting on 4-5 October in Luxembourg and heads of government meet on 14-15 December in Brussels.
See also:
Barroso calls for intensified EU response to tackle illegal immigrants
by MaltaMedia News - Sep 8, 2006
© Copyright 2006 - MaltaMedia Online Network
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