Finns reject EU-imposed refugee quotas

Date: 01/07/1999

By Gareth Harding
HELSINKI hopes to make rapid progress towards harmonising the EU's patchwork of asylum and immigration laws during its presidency of the Union.

But Finland has made it clear it will not push for a solution to the thorny problem of how to share the burden of accommodating refugees amongst member states.

"I do not believe we can create a special EU-wide model for burden-sharing." Finnish Interior Minister Kari Hakamies told European Voice. "It depends on how many inhabitants the recipient country has, how rich it is, where the crisis is going on and where the refugees want to go."

Spurred on by the refugee crisis in Kosovo, Germany used its six-month presidency of the Union to press member states to accept a 'fairer' share of asylum-seekers. But countries such as the UK and France remain firmly opposed to the idea of making an open-ended pledge to take in large numbers in the event of a mass movement of refugees.

The burden-sharing issue will almost certainly raise its head during the special summit on justice and home affairs in Tampere, planned for October. But the Finns would prefer to focus on taking forward a controversial Austrian paper on harmonising member states' asylum and immigration laws during their presidency.

They are setting great store on the Tampere summit to unblock some of the more politically contentious proposals stuck in the Council of Minister. They also want to give political impetus to justice and home affairs issues following the Amsterdam Treaty's entry into force.

"We want concrete results from Tampere." said Hakamies. "One could make a comparison with the single market programme in the 1980s and agree the type of measures that were taken then."

The blueprint for such a programme was largely agreed by EU leaders last December when they adopted an action plan for achieving the Amsterdam Treaty's goal of creating an 'area of freedom, justice and security' within the Union.

Much of the Finnish presidency's work will consist of translating the action plan's fine-sounding principles into practice.

Now that Amsterdam is in force, it also faces the procedural headache of shifting responsibility for justice and home affairs issues from the exclusive preserve of EU governments into a shared competence between the European Commission, member states and MEPs.

Keyword: Burden-sharing.