Leaders row over migration regulation

By David Cronin

Date: 28/10/04

A DECISION by EU leaders to abolish national vetoes in justice and home affairs is being impeded by differences over whether it should cover legal migration.

The Dutch EU presidency is hoping that next weekend's Brussels summit (4-5 November) will endorse its bid to use qualified majority voting (QMV) at the Council of Ministers for all issues relating to asylum, immigration and border management.

But while QMV is already to be used for asylum-related decisions once minimum standards of refugee protection come into force across the Union, the question of regulating migration is proving more vexed.

Some member states have reservations about the question of whether controls on legal - rather than clandestine - immigration should also be included within the scope of QMV.

Germany is arguing that the EU constitution, to be signed by heads of state and government tomorrow (29 October), leaves it to national governments to decide if they wish to place limits on workers entering their territories. Berlin feels this room for manoeuvre is necessary to deal with cases where labour markets have difficulty catering with large numbers of job-seekers.

But the Dutch Minister for Integration and Immigration Rita Verdonk voiced optimism that a deal on QMV could be reached at the summit. This would be included in a far-reaching package known as the 'Hague Programme' on beefing up the EU's powers in the justice and home affairs field.

Among the measures envisaged in it are:

• Setting up a system in 2008 allowing a police officer in one EU state to access information held by a force in another if he or she needs it for a particular investigation;
• introducing a single procedure for assessing asylum claims regardless of the member state where they are lodged;
• appointing an EU 'special representative' for handling the readmission of asylum-seekers who fail in their bids to remain in the Union to their countries of origin, and;
• subjecting the police office

Europol to greater scrutiny by the European Parliament.

The programme moots the possibility of the EU jointly assessing asylum claims with other countries. But there is no mention of the idea - backed by the Italian commissioner-designate Rocco Buttiglione - of forming reception centres for Europe-bound asylum-seekers in north Africa.

The leaders are expected to reconfirm their December 2003 decision to transform the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna into a Human Rights Agency.

But they are still waiting for a paper on the subject from the European Commission. Despite a commitment to the agency made by José Manuel Barroso, its president-elect, to MEPs this week, the paper may not be unveiled until the summer of next year.

The EU executive has promised to launch a public consultation in the near future.

This will invite comments on such topics as whether the agency should be tasked solely with collecting data on the human rights situation inside the Union, or also with checking if outside countries abide by the human rights clauses in association agreements they sign with the EU.

The European Network Against Racism said that it would be perturbed by any move to dilute the current focus of the Vienna-based centre. "The monitoring centre was one of the most visible results of the European year against racism in 1997," noted ENAR's Sophie de Jonckheere.

Preview of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, meeting on 4-5 November 2004, where a move to the use of qualified majority voting (QMV) at the Council of Ministers for all issues relating to asylum, immigration and border management is expected to be discussed. There were differences over whether this should also cover legal migration.