For years, the European Union has been treading water when it comes to reforming the common asylum system. Germany’s new interior minister is still optimistic.
Irrespective of the controversial immigration debate in the French election campaign, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) expects progress in reforming the European asylum system as early as next month.
She perceives that French President Emmanuel Macron “puts an incredible amount of work and energy into it,” said Faeser on Wednesday after a meeting of the Bundestag’s interior committee. That’s why she hopes that “real progress will be made for a common asylum system” at the next meeting of EU interior ministers in early March.
Faeser had “rowed back” from her previous proposal to form a coalition of willing states from the German side, said the domestic policy spokesman for the Union faction, Alexander Throm (CDU) after the meeting. Rather, she explained that there should obviously not be a German way of her own, but that she would join an initiative by Macron.
Shared Echo
Faeser’s first appearance on the Interior Committee was perceived very differently by opposition MPs. Petra Pau (left) said it was good that the minister had offered not to make herself as rare in the committee as her predecessor Horst Seehofer (CSU). Throm, on the other hand, accused Faeser of having “talked for a long time, but not said much”. Konstantin von Notz (Greens) said that after the department had been in charge of politicians from the CDU and CSU for 16 years, domestic politics had to be “dusted off”.
The Union has meanwhile submitted an application on asylum policy, which will be discussed in the plenary session of the Bundestag this Thursday. In it, the CDU and CSU call on the federal government to “refrain from going it alone in Germany, which results in the additional admission of asylum seekers, as they further increase the migratory pressure on the EU and Germany”.
The federal government should not “buy the approval of other EU member states to the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which has been stalled for years, “by Germany taking on even larger parts of the migration burden in the future,” the motion continues.
In the wrong direction?
Throm said: “Federal Minister Faeser has gone in the wrong direction with her proposal for the “coalition of those willing to accept.” Even such an announcement could create incentives for more irregular migration. The Union is therefore calling on the government “to leave this wrong path and to align the negotiations on the European migration and asylum package with the principles of humanity, control, order and limitation”.
Under Faeser’s predecessor Seehofer, Germany had participated in the distribution of migrants and refugees rescued from distress at sea. Only a few states participated in this admission of asylum seekers, which was limited to a special group – above all from Italy.
The core of the Common European Asylum System is that the same rules for the admission of those seeking protection should apply everywhere. In practice this does not always work. For example, several German courts have ruled that refugees recognized in Greece should not be sent back there because of the poor living conditions for them.
Source: Stern
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