EU ministers debate emergency asylum suspension after Ceuta migrant surge

The mass influx of migrants into Ceuta over the summer has placed a controversial migration measure on EU ministers’ agenda.

In July, the sudden arrival of more than 70,000 migrants to the small Spanish North African territory triggered chaos, just as the EU was rolling out sweeping migration reforms to secure its external borders. Several countries argue that it should be possible to temporarily suspend asylum applications in crises of this scale under a new emergency procedure.

“If 70,000 people — mostly young men— arrive in a single day, then that obviously has nothing to do with asylum,” Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said Thursday. “And if that’s the case, then the existing regulations aren’t sufficient to handle it.”

Earlier this week, Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner presented plans to prevent and address sudden mass arrivals on the bloc’s borders that may be engineered and weaponized by other countries, including a ramped-up role for border agency Frontex.

The blueprint also included a European emergency response framework, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had included in her State of the Union address last month.

“We need to be able to react quickly to such emergencies when they come about,” Brunner said Thursday. He added that EU leaders would continue discussions at a meeting later this month, and that the Commission would make a proposal “on that basis.”

With talks Thursday not yet focused on specific proposals for the European emergency response framework, several countries were in wait-and-see mode.

Athens has proposed temporarily suspendingasylum applications in emergency situations, and the idea has the support of German and Austrian ministers.

Diplomats and ministers from three other countries said they’d wait for the Commission’s proposal before taking a position. Diplomats also raised concerns about the impact of suspending asylum applications — which could effectively result in large-scale pushbacks banned under international law — on fundamental rights, but agreed the EU needed to discuss it.

“There is obviously a tension between the right to asylum and 80,000 people appearing at the border of, for example, Ceuta,” one EU diplomat, granted anonymity to discuss the private talks, said ahead of Thursday’s ministerial. The EU also needs to discuss “what can and cannot be done” in an emergency without violating people’s rights, the diplomat said. “It’s a hard nut to crack.”

“The need for having these kinds of emergency tools is pretty clear to us. The discussion is whether it should be on the EU level or more on the national level,” Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssell said.

“If there would be an EU mechanism, it’s crucial that [it] won’t constitute a problem” for countries like Finland and Poland, which already have protective measures in place, he said. “Otherwise there’s no use having an EU response.”

The discussion moves the debate around EU migration policy in a new direction that’s bound to cause controversy, just as ministers adopted another controversial reform that allows member countries to send failed asylum-seekers to deportation hubs in countries outside the bloc.

Civil society groups have criticized the so-called return hubs as “legal black holes,” but a group made up of Austria, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Greece are meeting regularly to lay the groundwork for such centers.

Spain was the only country to vote against the reform; Belgium abstained. Ireland and Denmark have an opt-out to EU justice matters and didn’t participate in the vote.