Friday, September 18, 2015
The EU Commission's relocation proposal was approved by the European Parliament in an emergency vote by 370 ballots in favor, 134 against and 52 abstentions. EU Interior Ministers will now have to approve the plan in a meeting in Brussels on September 22.
On September 14, European University Institute Professor Anna Triandafyllidou wrote in LSE’s EUROPP blog on the key measures required to help manage Europe’s migration crisis. She argues that EU governments need to broaden their focus beyond the Mediterranean, recognize the mixed motivations that underpin migration, acknowledge the regional realities within individual countries, and better understand the booming smuggling business that facilitates migration routes.
According to Triandafyllidou, there is a need for an emergency and a medium term plan. The emergency plan has partly been worked out by EU authorities, with quotas for distributing 120,000 refugees -on top of the 32,000 decided last spring- among the EU members, taking into account the size of the country, its financial and institutional capacity, as well as the number of asylum seekers already hosted.
The relocation plan now being decided at the EU level should be brought upwards to the UN level, asking for the international community and particularly for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to participate in the plan, as their share in the refugee resettlement pie has been tiny so far.
In the medium term, it is clear that the Dublin system no longer holds. The first safe country of arrival principle cannot face today’s challenges. What we need is a flexible and practical quota system. The mechanism should be based on the size of a state’s population, its GDP, and the numbers of refugees already present.
See also Triandafyllidou's recent paper: Irregular migration in Greece & Greek News Agenda: Migration crisis
