Prague, April 7 (CTK) – Czechs and other opponents of the refugee quotas should realise that by rejecting them completely, they contribute to the end of the Schengen system of free movement within the EU borders, David Klimes writes in daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) on Thursday.
The latest proposal by the European Commission (EC) for a permanent system of redistribution of refugees in the EU has no chance to make it through. Not only that the debate on the temporary refugee quotas nearly damaged Europe more than the migrant crisis last year, but since the member states are fighting hard for any particular common policy, they could scarcely let the Brussels bureaucrats decide how many hundreds or thousands of refugees each country should accept, Klimes says.
Yet EC President Jean-Claude Juncker has two very good arguments in his defence when promoting a quota-based system.
“The first sounds: ‘What have you done, gentlemen, to solve the migrant crisis if you do not like quotas?’ And the other is: ‘Do you really want the end of Schengen?’,” Klimes writes.
Either the quotas or the end of Schengen may have seemed a false dilemma at the time when it was possible to hope that the dictate of Brussels can be replaced by voluntary solidarity, but this time is over, Klimes writes.
He says the numbers offered by individual countries (the Czech Republic willing to accept 1,100 refugees) were too low to really ease the main target countries, Germany and Sweden, and the transit countries, mainly Greece and Italy, of the refugee burden. This is why the obligatory quotas followed last September.
The consequences were disastrous. Not only that the quotas served as “welcomed ammunition” to nationalists in many countries, but they did not work in practice either. Out of the planned 160,000 refugees, only some 1000 have been really transferred, which is a negligible figure. The reaction by Juncker’s team is therefore brutal and understandable, Klimes notes.
But instead of another series of nationalist bons mots, in which President Milos Zeman is a champion, the Czech Republic should rather start forming a coalition for the softest possible variant of quotas, Klimes points out.
Since a permanent redistribution of refugees is an absolutely unacceptable infringement on the national rights, a solution might be a quota-based system to be applied during a similar migrant crisis as that Europe is facing now, Klimes says.
“It must be negotiated, since if we are forming a protest coalition only, Germany will see the only solution in the construction of fences along the border and Angela Merkel will be forced by the circumstances to dismantle Schengen,” Klimes writes.
Though quotas have become a synonym of evil, it depends on their final form. If the EU changes some of its migration and asylum rules, it might approve a system that will not be launched at all eventually, Klimes writes.
The most important step is to “rewrite the list of safe countries” as the current Copenhagen criteria are too strict. The list must be dramatically extended and the EU must admit that there are some “safe areas” even in some problematic countries where refugees can be sent after their asylum applications were rejected, Klimes writes.
He cites the example of the Iraqi Christians, who rejected Czech asylum and left for Germany that is to send them back, whom the Czech Interior minister wants to expel to the Kurdish part of Iraq unless they seek Czech asylum.
If the number of the countries where economic migrants can be returned increases, if the conditions of refugees in various EU countries are harmonised, if the Schengen outer border is better protected and so on, it is acceptable to approve the EU refugee quotas as a last resort, Klimes says.
Their opponents must not forget that the Schengen system, which they take for granted, is at stake, and that it can never work if thousands of refugees are crossing borders, he writes.
“The longer we are postponing an overall solution to the migrant crisis, the less and less Schengen weighs until it disappears all of a sudden to our great surprise,” Klimes concludes in HN.
