German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande take part in discussions on the migrants crisis at the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday.
Agencies
Strasbourg/Brussels
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday Europe needs to rewrite its “obsolete” asylum rules to tackle the migrant crisis as European warships went into action against people smugglers in the Mediterranean.
Merkel made the call in a speech with French President Francois Hollande to the European Parliament - the first such joint address since the fall of the Berlin Wall - in which they urged the increasingly divided EU to unite to tackle a wave of problems including migration and the war in Syria.
“Let’s be frank. The Dublin process, in its current form, is obsolete,” Merkel said. The process, which forces frontline states like Italy and Greece to process and welcome most migrants, “started from good intentions... but the challenges raised at our borders are from now on untenable,” Merkel said.
“I appeal for a new procedure” to redistribute asylum seekers “fairly” throughout the 28-nation bloc, the chancellor said.
“It is exactly now that we need more Europe. We need courage and cohesion, which Europe has always shown when it was necessary.”
“In the refugee crisis we must not succumb to the temptation of falling back into acting in nationalistic terms,” said Merkel. “National solo efforts are no solution to the refugee crisis.”
Germany is Europe’s top destination for people fleeing war and misery in the continent’s greatest migrant influx since World War II. Its richest economy expects between 800,000 and 1mn newcomers this year alone.
German authorities said yesterday they had registered around 577,000 asylum seekers in the first nine months of the year, a third of whom claim to be Syrian.
Hollande warned of the risk of returning to national frontiers, the dismantling of common policies and the abandoning of the euro.
“We need not less Europe but more Europe. Europe must affirm itself otherwise we will see the end of Europe, our demise,” Hollande told lawmakers.
The French leader meanwhile admitted that the EU had reacted too slowly to the turmoil on its borders since the Arab Spring in 2011, which had produced the huge wave of refugees seeking a better life in Europe.
“I acknowledge that Europe was slow in understanding that tragedy in the Middle East or Africa could not but have consequences for Europe itself,” he said.
The last time the leaders of France and Germany stood together in the parliament was 26 years ago when Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl gave a similar speech just weeks after the Berlin Wall fell.
Meanwhile the EU formally launched Operation Sophia which gives European naval vessels in international waters off Libya the power to stop, board, seize and destroy people traffickers’ boats.
Around 3,000 people have died making the perilous crossing over the Mediterranean to Europe this year.
The first phase of the operation, which involved monitoring trafficker networks and rescuing refugees from rickety boats, has been running since June.
“Assets will conduct boarding, search, seizure and diversion, on the high seas, of vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling or trafficking,” the EU mission said in a statement.
An Italian aircraft carrier, a French frigate and one British, one Spanish and two German ships are involved in the mission, which follows in the footsteps of EU anti-piracy operations in the Horn of Africa.
“We follow the traffickers and want to arrest them and seize their ships,” Captain Stefan Klatt, who commands the Werra, one of the German ships that is taking part in the operation, told AFP.
The EU gave the go-ahead for the operation in September, but its ships are not, for now, allowed to pursue traffickers into Libyan waters.
At least three other vessels supplied by the Belgian, British and Slovenian navies are expected to arrive in the area at the end of October to complete the force, which also include four aircraft and 1,318 personnel.
Meanwhile, Greek police said yesterday they had broken up an international criminal organisation smuggling migrants and refugees through Greece, one of the main gateways into the European Union.
Officers arrested 12 people from Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria in raids on apartments and other locations across Athens on Sunday and confiscated hundreds of fake identity cards, passports and other documents, the force said.
The smugglers were divided into six units which helped migrants travel from Turkey via the Greek island of Kos on to Macedonia and Italy on planes, buses and trains, the statement said.
Police attached an organisation chart of at least 30 suspects, plus an unknown number of associates in Turkey, drawn up after what they called one of their biggest operations against people smugglers.
The gang gave fake asylum registration documents to migrants arriving on Kos in exchange for about 3,000 euros ($3,400) each, the police added.
