EU wins legal battle on refugee quotas
LUXEMBOURG — The European Union’s top court roundly dismissed complaints on Wednesday by Slovakia and Hungary about EU migration policy, upholding Brussels’ right to force member states to take in asylum-seekers.
In the latest twist to a divisive dispute that broke out two years ago when more than a million migrants poured across the Mediterranean, the European Court of Justice found that the EU was entitled to order national governments to take in quotas of mainly Syrian refugees relocated from Italy and Greece.
“The court dismisses the actions brought by Slovakia and Hungary against the provisional mechanism for the mandatory relocation of asylum-seekers,” the Luxembourgbased court said, adding it rejected the complaints “in their entirety”.
“The mechanism actually contributes to enabling Greece and Italy to deal with the impact of the 2015 migration crisis and is proportionate.”
The program set up by the executive European Commission was approved by majority vote of member states in the face of opposition from formerly communist countries in the east who said their societies could not absorb mainly Muslim immigrants.
It provided for the relocation of up to 120,000 people, but only some 25,000 have so far been moved. A further program for resettling people directly from outside the EU has also struggled to hit targets for taking in asylum-seekers.
Diplomats had expected the ruling and said it may lead to resuming EU talks over an emergency mechanism for exceptionally high arrivals of refugees and migrants. The issue has been stalled for more than two years and divided the bloc at a time when it faces Brexit, security threats and international challenges.
The challengers from the EU’s east say the obligatory relocation of asylum-seekers arriving in frontline countries like Greece and Italy via the Mediterranean undermines their sovereignty and endangers their homogeneous societies.