German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an unusually sober warning this week that the passport-free Schengen zone -- hailed as a success story -- was under threat if the European Union did not agree a common asylum policy.
With Hungary sealing off its main train station to stop asylum-seekers moving across the EU and Italy saying it was ready to reimpose border controls, observers fear the genie is out of the bottle and there will now be a rush to restore internal frontiers.
"If Europe does not take steps as a whole, the current situation is worrying for free movement at the heart of the EU," Matthieu Tardis, a migration expert based in Paris, told AFP.
Since its creation in 1995, the Schengen area -- named after a border town in Luxembourg -- has abolished passport controls for travel between 22 of the EU's 28 countries, plus non-EU Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
Supporters say Schengen has swept away psychological as well as physical barriers among Europeans, and that it has been a boon for Europe's single market, slashing costs by doing away with armies of border bureaucrats.
But the system is now creaking under the pressure of the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, as people from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa flood into Europe seeking refuge from war and repression.
The lack of a EU-wide asylum policy is a key problem, with different countries dealing with asylum claims in different ways. This leads to disputes over the fairness of the distribution across the bloc and to refugees trying to head to those with most favourable terms.
Europeans "must agree on a common asylum policy," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Wednesday.
EU rules say the country where a refugee first arrives must process their asylum claim.
But after Germany said last week it would waive those rules for Syrians, as part of an estimated 800,000 asylum requests it expects to deal with this year, there has been a flood of people trying to travel through the EU to get there, and confusion about how migration rules and Schengen overlap.
"When we have common external borders (notwithstanding Schengen), we cannot leave front-line member states alone," European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said in a column in the Irish Times....
(Agence France Presse)
ahram.org.eg
2/9/15
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