Refugee crisis: Anti-quota EU leaders meet amid deadlock

Brussels: Central and eastern European leaders strongly opposed to attempts by Brussels and Berlin to impose refugee quotas on them are meeting Luxembourg’s foreign minister in Prague on Monday.

Their meeting with Jean Asselborn comes before talks by EU leaders on Tuesday and Wednesday to try to decide on what already looks like a vain attempt to limit the flow of refugees and migrants into Europe.

After months of being consistently behind the curve in grappling with the EU’s huge migration crisis, interior ministers will hold a meeting on Tuesday focused on the highly divisive issue of mandatory refugee-sharing across the union.

There will then be an emergency summit of leaders on Wednesday.

Asselborn’s meeting follows a letter from the Czech government, which wrote to Brussels arguing that compulsory quotas were illegal and that it could take the issue to the European court of justice in Luxembourg.

“The terrain is still very uncertain,” said a senior source from Luxembourg, which will chair Tuesday’s meeting.

“We don’t yet have agreement. It’s going to be very, very difficult.”

This week’s fresh attempt to agree on a quota system comes amid the deepest divisions between western and eastern Europe since the former Soviet-bloc countries joined the EU a decade ago.

At issue is the paltry figure of 66,000 refugees being shared across the EU after being moved from Italy and Greece.

They have already agreed to share 40,000 and were to redistribute a further 120,000.

But 54,000 of those were from Hungary whose hardline anti-immigration government wants no part of the scheme.

Given that up to one million people are expected to enter Germany alone this year and that Frontex, the EU’s border agency, says 500,000 are currently preparing to leave Turkey for the EU, the figures being fought over in Brussels are risible.

But the numbers are not the real issue.

The row is about power and sovereignty.

In the end it seems that all countries will join in sharing refugees, with the exception of Britain which has opted out of the scheme.

The other two countries with optouts, Ireland and Denmark, have agreed to take part, leaving the UK isolated.

For the east Europeans, the vexed question is one of decision-taking - whether Brussels and Berlin sets their quota or whether they decide themselves to take in refugees.

They feel they are being bullied and blackmailed by the Germans who have threatened to withhold EU funding for the recalcitrants.

For the supporters of quotas, especially in the European commission, the numbers are also less important.

For Brussels, the key factor is that the start of mandatory sharing would mark the first tentative steps towards common EU policies on refugees, and set a precedent to be built on.

Germany is the biggest and strongest backer of the proposed new regime, not least since it is a replica of the system practised in Germany.

It has a well-functioning federalised scheme spreading and funding the burden across the 16 German lander (or states), based on a formula that takes account of local wealth, unemployment rates and immigrant population density.

In effect, the European commission is proposing to extend the German model to the EU.

If there is no consensus on Tuesday, the pro-quotas camp could push the issue to a qualified majority vote which they would comfortably win.

But that could open up deep divisions and cause major political damage.

It would mean forcing countries to take in people they don’t want and send people to countries where they do not want to go, said an EU official who believed a vote on such an incendiary issue would be counter-productive.

The summit on Wednesday is to focus on how to keep people out rather than how to bring them in, while avoiding the mayhem of recent weeks in the Balkans and central Europe where borders have been opening and closing on a daily basis in an atmosphere of panic and chaos.