EU looks at restricting passport-free travel

A Syrian couple heading to Serbia has a meal and rests after arriving Friday at a transit center for refugees near the northern Macedonian village of Tabanovce.
A Syrian couple heading to Serbia has a meal and rests after arriving Friday at a transit center for refugees near the northern Macedonian village of Tabanovce.

BRUSSELS -- The European Union is exploring options to restrict its passport-free travel because of the migration crisis and Greece's troubles in controlling its border, according to EU documents.

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If action is taken, the bloc's member states would invoke an emergency rule to keep some border controls for two more years, reversing a decades-old trend of expanding passport-free travel on the continent.

Since 1995, people have crossed borders among Schengen Area member countries without document checks. Each of the current 26 countries party to the Schengen Agreement is allowed to unilaterally put up border controls for a maximum of six months, but that time limit can be extended for up to two years if a member is found to be failing to protect its borders.

The documents show that EU policymakers are preparing to make unprecedented use of an emergency provision by declaring that Greece is failing to sufficiently protect its border. Some 2,000 people are still arriving daily on Greek islands in smugglers' boats from Turkey, most of them keen to move deeper into Europe to wealthier countries such as Germany and Sweden.

A European official showed the documents to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the documents are confidential. Greek government officials declined to comment on the content of documents not made public.

In Brussels on Friday, EU nations acknowledged that the overall functioning of Schengen "is at serious risk" and said Greece must make further efforts to address "serious deficiencies" within the next three months.

European inspectors visited Greek border sites in November and gave Athens until early May to upgrade the border management on its islands. Two draft assessments forwarded to the Greek government in early January indicated Athens was making progress, although they noted "important shortcomings" in handling migrant flows.

But with asylum seekers still arriving at a pace 10 times that of January 2015, European countries are reluctant to dismantle their emergency border controls. And if they keep them in place without authorization, EU officials fear the entire concept of the open-travel zone could be brought down.

A summary written by an official in the EU's Dutch presidency for a meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers last month showed they decided that declaring Greece to have failed in its upgrade was "the only way" for Europe to extend the time for border checks. The official said they agreed to invoke the two-year rule under Article 26 of the open-travel agreement.

"With no decrease in migratory pressure and time running out, our ministers agreed ... that the only way to continue beyond the maximum time limit during which these border controls may be carried out is to adopt a [European] Council recommendation under Article 26 of the Schengen Border Code," the official wrote in an email shared with The Associated Press.

The assessments of Greece became notably more negative.

In a Jan. 27 report, marked "restricted," the EU Commission cited "serious deficiencies in the carrying out of external border controls," adding that "Greece is seriously neglecting its obligations."

In Friday's statement, too, the EU told Greece "that given the scale of the situation, further efforts are needed."

The EU wants Greece to improve screening and disembarkation procedures for those arriving by boat, and to increase its capacity to document and house asylum seekers and build detention facilities for those facing deportation.

Greece says it has already addressed many of the European concerns. It has promised to complete new screening centers on four Greek islands and build two new transit camps within the next week, with the help of the country's armed forces.

With a sense of compromise, Friday's EU statement acknowledged the challenge facing Greece, saying "the very large number of arrivals is such that the external border controls of any member state would be placed under severe pressure."

But it stressed that the concept of Schengen needed to be preserved. "The difficulties faced by Greece have an impact on the EU as a whole, and have to be resolved collectively."

So far, six Schengen members have imposed border checks, and many of those would have to dismantle them starting in mid-May under Schengen rules. Germany has until May 13 and has made clear that it does not want to relinquish the checks. The other countries are France, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Italy sees no quick fix

EU leaders will wrestle with the migration crisis at a summit starting Thursday in Brussels after failing since last year to come up with a unified approach.

Germany and Italy warned Friday that the influx of migrants to Europe will go on for years. A senior aide to German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni in underscoring cooperation with Turkey to try to stop migrants before they cross into the European Union and warned against a rush to close Europe's internal borders.

"If we sell to our public opinion that there is a quick fix of the migration issue, we are selling something very poisonous," Gentiloni said during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

Germany took in almost 1 million refugees in six months last year because the stability of Europe and the Middle East "largely depends on whether we handle this challenge with care or whether we handle it in a way that is unpredictable and comes to devastating results," Peter Altmaier, Merkel's chief of staff, said on the same panel. "It is not a transitional problem, it is a challenge we will face for the next couple of years."

This year through Tuesday, 80,754 migrants had crossed the Mediterranean into Europe, mainly Greece, according to the United Nations refugee agency. About 40 percent are fleeing war-torn Syria and one-third are children.

"Locking of doors is not a solution," Gentiloni said, warning European governments against further reintroduction of border checks at internal frontiers. Earlier in the day the EU said the region's passport-free Schengen Area is "at serious risk" and blamed Greece for not doing enough to stem the refugee flow.

With Merkel this week urging Turkey to make good on pledges to do more to halt the flow of refugees bound for Europe, Altmaier lauded the nation for its part in solving the crisis.

Turkey "has behaved in a way that is more committed to humanitarian values ... than many other countries in Europe," he said. "As my personal opinion I'm wholeheartedly convinced that Turkey is a safe country, at least for refugees."

Briton Weighs In

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom -- an EU member outside the Schengen Area -- is preparing to vote on an EU membership referendum that Prime Minister David Cameron has turned largely into a vote on the bloc's migration policy.

Ed Balls, former finance spokesman for the opposition Labor Party, told BBC radio on Friday that Cameron must persuade voters he can do more to curb migration from other EU members.

"I support the argument he's been making that we need to move away from free movement," Balls said. "National controls on the amount of economic migration I don't think will happen quickly enough for the referendum, but what we've got to do is say to people 'let's stay in and win that argument over time."'

He also signaled the continent's migration crisis makes the Schengen zone appear unsustainable.

"Without the refugee crisis, maybe you could sustain the Schengen borderless Europe," Balls said. "But at a time where things feel out of control, it's very hard to see how you can carry on without proper borders."

Cameron's demand for curbs on free movement has been watered down after resistance from EU leaders including Merkel. A draft renegotiation deal on course to be ratified this month proposes temporary restrictions on in-work benefits for new migrants, angering euroskeptics in his own Conservative Party.

"The European Union was drawn up in an era where people thought there'd be trade in goods and the movement of capital, but the movement of people on this scale was not expected, it's unprecedented," Balls said. "I don't think in the end we're going to persuade populations you can manage an open economy and manage migration fairly unless you manage it, and at the moment it feels unmanaged."

Balls lost his parliamentary seat at the general election in May after Labor campaigned on a platform that included opposition to holding a referendum on EU membership. Now a fellow at Harvard University, Balls said supporters of staying in the 28-nation bloc have "got to win the argument that we can have influence from within. We've got to win this referendum."

Information for this article was contributed by Derek Gatopoulos and Raf Casert of The Associated Press and by Alex Morales, Ian Wishart, Henry Meyer and Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 02/13/2016

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