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Migrants disembark from a small boat after arriving at Lampedusa, Italy, on Sept. 16. (AP/Yonhap)

The European Union is coming up with various measures to respond to a second migrant crisis now in full swing due to a steep increase in the number of African migrants arriving in Europe. The crux of the matter can be summed up as what EU members can do to share the burden of migrant inflow.

On Oct. 4, the leaders of the 27 EU countries gathered together for a European Council meeting, where they agreed on a new regulation to respond to the crisis in the areas of migration and asylum in Europe. This regulation for crisis situations will be applied in exceptional circumstances when a massive influx of migrants arrives unexpectedly, like during the migrant crisis from 2015 to 2016 and the recent migrant crisis on the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The EU plans to conclude discussions concerning the regulation before June next year.

The agreed upon regulation increased the number of weeks EU member states can hold migrants at the border while they examine asylum seekers’ applications for international protection from 12 weeks to a maximum of 20 weeks if there’s a sudden jump in the inflow of migrants. Additionally, a clause granting “immediate protection” to migrants attempting to escape extreme danger such as an armed conflict was scrapped.

Human rights groups say this new regulation would lead to the large-scale confinement of migrants and may deteriorate the quality of the asylum process as well as increase the risk of repatriation.

Earlier in June, the EU also agreed on a “mandatory solidarity” system that can only be activated when certain member countries are being swamped with migrants. When activated, this provision mandates other EU member states to accept asylum seekers redistributed to them. If not, they have to pay a 20,000-euro contribution for each migrant or provide financial support in the form of manpower, facilities, or equipment. In this way, the EU intends to “compulsorily” redistribute 30,000 migrants flocking to certain EU countries to other EU member states.

The EU is contemplating such policies because of the increasingly apparent limits of the 1990 Dublin Convention that requires countries where migrants first arrive to take responsibility for their asylum process. Although this regulation was twice amended in 2003 and 2013, its basic principles remain the same, structurally putting the onus of asylum processing to countries that function as gateways to Europe.

In the end, the European Commission proposed legislation to reform the asylum system in 2016. Through this, the principle that new asylum seekers must be redistributed to other EU member states when they are streaming to certain countries was set in stone. In October and November of 2017, the European Parliament adopted a report containing the amendment that asylum seekers should be allotted based on member states’ population and economic situation. Related discussions are still ongoing.

By Noh Ji-won, Berlin correspondent

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