EU floats refugee plan to rescue Merkel

The European Union will agree next week to look into creating disembarkation platforms in north Africa and elsewhere to decide asylum requests before claimants get to Europe, a draft statement ahead of an EU summit showed.

European capitals from Rome to Budapest have called for such centres as the bloc has struggled since 2015 to deal with higher immigration, but concerns that processing people outside EU borders could violate the law have so far prevented such moves.

The immigration plan would help German Chancellor Angela Merkel contain a rebellion in her government as disputes over refugees threaten to dominate next week’s summit of the bloc’s leaders. The wording may help appease German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who leads the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, and has given the chancellor a two-week ultimatum to secure an EU agreement that would return migrants to the countries in which they were first registered. If she fails to deliver, Seehofer has threatened to start turning away migrants at the German border in defiance of the chancellor.

The document, whose wording might still change, is not public but was seen by Reuters before the June 28-29 EU summit, where all 28 EU leaders will lock horns again over migration, an issue that has bitterly divided them. Berlin would introduce right after the summit a unilateral ban on refugees already registered in other EU states, said the junior governing Christian Social Union, which holds the interior ministry. The EU border agency Frontex said more than 90 per cent of those arriving in Italy, Greece and Spain register for asylum there. But they still often go north, including to Germany.