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Friday, 29.03.2024, 11:23
EU seeks to force member states to take in asylum seekers or pay fees
The European Commission proposed on May 4th to reinforce the existing Dublin criteria assigning asylum seekers to their first EU country of arrival, withdrawing benefits for those who move on within the bloc and introducing more stringent measures to register them.
In future, however, a corrective fairness mechanism would kick in whenever a member state experiences a disproportionate surge in arrivals.
Each member state would be allocated an asylum threshold, beyond which the redistribution mechanism would trigger automatically. All further asylum applicants would then be allocated to other EU countries.
Any member state can opt to "temporarily not take part in the reallocation," the commission wrote, but must then pay EUR 250,000 per asylum seeker it does not take in, with the money benefiting the countries that end up processing these requests.
Asylum issues are highly sensitive and have triggered a populist backlash in several member states. Some Central European countries have refused attempts to make them take in refugees, while a one-off scheme to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers within the bloc has barely taken off.
Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka – whose country has opposed any permanent scheme to redistribute asylum seekers in the EU – said on Tuesday that "we equally reject proposals for sanctions for the non-compliance [with such quotas]."
The existing redistribution scheme will be enforced "to the full," the commission stressed Wednesday.