Parliament agrees on binding refugee quotas

A majority in the European Parliament has voted in favour of urgent measures to prevent migrants from risking their lives while crossing the Mediterranean Sea. In addition to calling for a permanent European rescue operation, the Parliament also asked for mandatory quotas to make sure that asylum seekers are distributed more equally across member states.

The current European asylum system is based on the principle that asylum seekers are sent back to the country where they first entered the EU. In many cases, this means that refugees are forced to return to one of the Mediterranean countries, such as Italy, Greece or Spain.

Therefore the European Parliament has called for “responsibility-sharing among EU countries,” including binding quotas. The resolution was approved on Wednesday (April 29), with 449 MEPs in favour and 130 against.

One of the opponents was MEP Timothy Kirkhope from the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR). He doesn’t like the idea of allocating specific numbers to every one of the EU’s 28 member states, and instead would consider the suitability of the countries involved.

“The problem we now have is that everybody wants to put some kind of almost legal obligations in terms of the division of responsibilities,” he said. “That does not actually make sense, nor does it actually stack up in terms of the morality which should be to make sure that people who seek asylum, and have genuine reasons to be granted it, are in countries which are actually suited to them, rather than just simply being allocated a country. I mean that is really in my view difficult to justify.”

According to Kirkhope, the EU should look to rules outlined by the United Nations to decide where refugees could get asylum.

Parliament divided on binding refugee quotas for EU member states – U Talking to Me? debate

During the Euranet Plus debate, Kirkhope agreed that more money should be given to countries on the front line, such as Greece, Spain, Malta and Italy, to cope with high numbers of refugees arriving on their borders.

“I have no argument against providing more resources to those countries that actually have got this frontline responsibility. Whether these resources are paid directly to the country, whether they are in return for improving the quality of receptions and so on, whatever it is, I am in favour of that actually. I think that is a better approach,” he said.

But according to the Green MEP Ska Keller, both measures, compulsory quotas for the 28 member states as well as more funds for southern Mediterranean countries, should be put in place.

And she explained that more money should be allocated to Greece to handle illegal migrants.

“In the past, the EU has been funding return centers where people have been stopped for 18 months and more without ever being returned anywhere. That was a wrong priority of Europe and was a wrong priority in the past in Greece,” she said. “And now we see also really weird things. For example, Greece is being forced to refurbish planes to use for border control, money that Greece does not have, instead of giving money so that receptions centers could, for example, be built.”

Other measures to prevent refugees from risking their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea should be taken, she said.

“They would ask for a visa, that would help them to get to the EU and apply for asylum here. Other issues are resettlement programs, like we should have more for Syrians, and humanitarian corridors is another solution, but yes, this is a package solution. And we need to get refugees to be able to ask for protections without risking their lives again,” Keller stressed.

Over 1,700 refugees have died in Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of the year. The European border agency Frontex expects that up to 1 million migrants will try to cross the Mediterranean in the coming months.

The Parliament’s resolution came as a response to the “inefficient conclusions,” as expressed by the EU legislative body, of last week’s emergency EU summit, during which the 28 EU heads of state and government decided to triple the budget of Triton, a border patrol mission, running under Frontex.