Proposal for a Council Decision establishing provisional measures in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy, Greece and Hungary

The European Commission presented a comprehensive European Agenda on Migration1 on 13 May 2015, outlining, on the one hand, the immediate measures that will be proposed by the Commission to respond to the crisis situation in the Mediterranean and, on the other, the medium and long terms initiatives that need to be taken to provide structural solutions for better managing migration in all its aspects.

As part of the immediate measures, the Commission announced that, by the end of May, it will propose a mechanism to trigger the emergency response system envisaged under Article 78(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The Agenda acknowledged that today Member States' asylum systems face an unprecedented pressure and that with the volumes of arrivals in particular to frontline Member States, their reception and processing capacities are already stretched to their limits.

The Agenda announced that the proposal to trigger Article 78(3) will include a temporary distribution scheme for persons in clear need of international protection to ensure a fair and balanced participation of all Member States to this common effort. A redistribution key was included in the Annex to the Agenda, based on the criteria referred to therein (GDP, size of population, unemployment rate and past numbers of asylum seekers and of resettled refugees).

The Agenda underlined that the swift response that will be taken to reply to the current crisis in the Mediterranean must serve as the blueprint for the EU's reaction to future crisis, whichever part of the common external border comes under pressure from East to West and from North to South.

The objective of this proposal is to establish provisional measures in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy, Greece and Hungary, in order to enable them to deal in an effective manner with the current significant inflow of third country nationals in their territories, putting their asylum systems under strain.

• Primary Source

EUR-Lex: COM(2015)451: Follow the progress of this proposal through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2015:451:FIN

ESO: Background information: Refugee Crisis: European Commission takes decisive action http://www.europeansources.info/record/press-release-refugee-crisis-european-commission-takes-decisive-action/

ESO: Information Guide: European Migration Challenges http://www.europeansources.info/record/information-guide-european-migration-challenges/

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