The EU interior ministers are considering a new emergency framework regulation to be able to respond to migration crises. Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner announced this on Tuesday in Brussels. Part of the regulation could be a temporary suspension of asylum procedures. The aim is to respond to the “extraordinary situations at the EU borders” that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed in her State of the Union speech two weeks ago.
Specifically, the aim is to draw lessons from what happened in Ceuta. In the summer, tens of thousands of migrants stormed Spain's exclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Images that the migration commissioner doesn't want to see again. Ceuta was a crisis situation: "The EU has passed this stress test. But we will not go back to 'business as usual' afterwards."
In response to such crisis situations, Brunner now wants to develop an emergency framework regulation: It is intended to give EU member states the necessary tools to respond “with more resilience and more speed” to extraordinary situations, as Brunner put it, especially when “mass movements are artificially created and used as a weapon against the European Union”.
The EU Commission wants to avoid the term “pushbacks”. These would be contrary to international law. The short-term suspension of the right to asylum should be justified under international law as a threat to national security as an emergency measure.
But what legally constitutes a crisis, who ultimately decides on the definition: all of this is still unclear. Brunner wants to initiate negotiations on this on Thursday at the summit of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg. This is probably why the Austrian tried not to make any overly specific promises on Tuesday.
However, as EU diplomats say, Poland is likely to serve as the basis for the emergency framework regulation. The country stopped asylum procedures for people from Belarus in 2025 - first at the Polish-Belarusian border, later throughout the entire national territory. The reason given at the time was that there was a threat to national security from the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
The allied states Russia and Belarus would send people to the border to destabilize the country - a sign of hybrid warfare. Donald Tusk's government argued that these would not be classic asylum seekers, but rather people who would be exploited by hostile actors.
At the time, Brussels held back with reactions; Poland could now be used as a model to find a legal basis. In the future, a country could report a crisis situation and request a rapid response group from the EU border protection unit Frontex. However, who makes the legal assessment as to whether and how the proposed emergency framework regulation could subsequently be applied is the subject of discussions.
There was interest in Brunner's initiative from Berlin on Tuesday. As “Bild” reported, Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) and his European colleagues would consider “robust” rejections at the Union’s borders. In neighboring Austria, the Interior Minister, Gerhard Karner (ÖVP), has been thinking out loud about rejections for a long time: In 2023, he spoke out in favor of a “refoulement directive” to enable uniform rejections of irregular migrants at the EU's external borders.
However, Karner's idea contradicts the so-called non-refoulement requirement. Those seeking protection must not be deported back to a country where they are being persecuted. This core statement of the Geneva Refugee Convention must also be taken into account by EU lawyers when they begin work on the emergency framework regulation for the external borders: the non-refoulement standard must be maintained, diplomats said.
