Far from pulling together, however, such meetings frequently degenerate into acrimony and produce little progress. “The summit must understand that Europe only advances if we regain confidence”.
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Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said a European border control agency was urgently needed, but he doubted it would ever have the manpower, equipment, or institutional capacity to secure external EU frontiers.
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Germany, in mid-September, had introduced internal border checks amid large numbers of asylum seekers transiting through Austria.
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According to the BBC however, efforts to relocate 160,000 refugees already in Europe are moving extremely slowly with only around 200 actually being transferred from one country to another so far.
They discussed plans unveiled Tuesday for a new border and coastguard force which can step in if necessary without the host country’s consent. “This means that in the future Europe will not remain vulnerable because the Schengen border is insufficiently protected”, Interfax cited him as saying.
Earlier this week, the European Commission unveiled plans for an enhanced border coast guard, its latest attempt to respond to the migration crisis that has seen an estimated 1.5 million people enter the European Union this year. Frontex troops will be deployed mostly in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Malta, Greece and Spain, as well as Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.
Greece’s overwhelmed border guards have largely looked the other way as the migrants continue north in search of better prospects in Germany, Sweden and Austria.
“Over the past months, the European Council has developed a strategy aimed at stemming the unprecedented migratory flows Europe is facing”, said the leaders in a press release, but adding that “implementation is insufficient and has to be speeded up”. Promised assistance, including additional border guards and fingerprinting machines, has been slow to materialize, they complain.
It would have a stronger mandate than the current Frontex border agency, which suffers from a lack of resources.
The hope among European Union leaders is that Syrians and others in Turkey would have less incentive to apply for global protection in the EU. But to make the regime mandatory would require a change in the Schengen rules.
The leaders also called for member states to move more quickly on other fronts.
Rutte said the bloc would be willing to help resettle numerous Syrian refugees in Turkey but only if Ankara helps stop the migrant influx to Europe. “Some of the other member states are quite bad at it, and there isn’t generally a culture of sharing intelligence”. The summit also takes place amid a surge in political populism that has linked the migration crisis to terrorism, suggesting that the Schengen passport-free system has jeopardised European security. “But, the level of effectiveness depends on the level of commitment by EU Member States”.
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A separate report on the functioning of the EU-Turkey action plan agreed with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels has concluded that migrant arrivals from Turkey were “practically unchanged” in the two weeks after the signing from the two weeks preceding it, an EU official said.
