EU leaders at war over fresh wave of migrants
THE EU was yesterday embroiled in a deepening war over how to cope with a fresh wave of immigration.
Italy’s new Eurosceptic government has threatened to pursue ‘other paths’ if Brussels does not overhaul its rulebook to prevent the country from becoming ‘Europe’s refugee camp’.
And Austria’s anti-immigration government fuelled the disarray by warning that a ‘revolution’ may be needed within the EU.
The fallout escalated after EU proposals aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2015 migration crisis were branded ‘dead’ yesterday.
The row focuses on who should look after and process asylum claims of new arrivals.
Italy’s new prime minister Giuseppe Conte branded the EU’s approach a ‘failure’ and insisted that rules needed to be renegotiated. Vowing to end ‘the immigration business’, Mr Conte called for the ‘automatic and obligatory’ redistribution of asylum seekers who arrive in Italy to other EU countries.
The call follows dismay over being ‘abandoned’ by other countries to deal with the arrival of 600,000 migrants. ‘We are not and will never be racists,’ he said. ‘We want procedures that determine refugee status to be certain and speedy, in order to effectively guarantee their (refugee) rights.’
As well as wanting to speed up deportations, Rome is determined to relax asylum rules that mean migrants have to be processed in the first EU member state in they arrive in.
Proposals setting out reforms to the EU’s so-called Dublin regulations on asylum were blocked by at least six member states in Luxembourg yesterday. Theo Francken, Belgium’s asylum and immigration minister, said: ‘The Dublin reform is dead. There is totally no consensus. First we have to fix the front door, fix the back door. Then we can find a compromise on who’s doing what.
‘When we don’t have a solution for the massive influx of illegal aliens in our Europe, Europe will end, and we will never get out of this crisis.’
Officials are concerned that failure to reach an agreement could lead to a political backlashes in Spain and Greece, similar to the one that happened in Italy, following an increase in new arrivals to both those countries.