Before chairing the summit, European Council President Donald Tusk acknowledged that the border agency is a “most controversial idea” but said that passport-free travel in the 26-nation Schengen area would be compromised if Europe’s outside borders are porous.
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“Border protection is and should be in the first place the domain of national states”, Mr Tusk said.
“The Commission’s proposals go in this direction and are therefore a good step forward and I hope that they can be adopted quickly”, he said.
He said Frontex would deploy a liaison officer in Ankara for the first time early next year to enhance cooperation with Turkey under its agreement with the EU. In Malta’s case, being an island, this is our extensive maritime zone.
In all of 2015, Frontex so far recorded more than 1.5 million irregular border crossings into Europe, he said.
Germany, the top destination for the migrants as Europe’s most dynamic economy, has led the calls for Europeans to admit people in distress and share the burden more evenly.
But the proposal faces strong opposition from some members, including Hungary and Poland, which view it as an assault by Brussels on national sovereignty.
“We see that the influx from Turkey to Greece is diminishing insufficiently”, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.
These claims refer to the European Commission’s proposal to upgrade Frontex, an agency that helps manage the EU’s external borders.
“We want a fair deal with Britain and this fair deal has to be a fair deal with other countries”, the BBC reports Juncker saying ahead of the summit. The EU is working with countries to ensure they take more people back.
The new agency will have a quick reaction force of 1,500 guards and a “right to intervene” in European Union nations that might be threatened with failing to secure their frontiers. Greek authorities say two people…
This week the Commission unveiled an ambitious plan for a new EU Border and Coast Guard to tackle problems on the EU’s external borders.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has welcomed proposals to build a new border agency out of Frontex that is able to draw on a permanent reserve of border guards and technical equipment provided by member states – but only if his country retains ultimate authority to police its borders.
A monitoring and risk analysis centre will be established to monitor migratory flows towards and within the European Union and to carry out risk analysis and mandatory vulnerability assessments to identify and address weak spots.
At an emergency meeting days after the Paris attacks, European interior and justice ministers agreed to temporarily extend such vetting to EU citizens, who were previously subject only to a cursory visual inspection of their passports. The change is widely seen as a response to last month’s terroristattacksinParis which revealed that some of the attackers were European Union citizens who had re-entered the bloc through its external borders. The plan would also deal with a weakness in the current system-the reluctance of “front-line” member states, such as Greece, to ask for help-by giving the commission the power to force them to accept assistance.
Once again, the migrant crisis is threatening to divide, more than unite, Europe.
Davutoglu met German Chancellor Angela Merkel and some other leaders before the main summit on Thursday to discuss a possible scheme to bring Syrian refugees directly from Turkey to Europe.
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Macedonia, a non-EU member state, is part of the so-called Balkans route that refugees have been using on their way to rich Western countries.
