EU works out options for change in asylum system

BRUSSELS, April 6: The European Union executive made proposals on Wednesday to reform EU asylum rules in response to the chaotic arrival of over a million migrants and refugees last year that has strained the bloc’s cohesion.
Reflecting divisions among member states, the European Commission offered options for amending what is known as the Dublin rules, under which people claim asylum in the first EU state they enter.
That system has left Greece and Italy unable and unwilling to offer asylum to all arrivals and seen many trekking north, prompting border closures that threaten the EU’s hallmark Schengen system of passport free travel within Europe.
A first option is to create a “corrective fairness mechanism” that would relocate asylum seekers from frontline states to elsewhere in the bloc – a method now being employed on an ad hoc basis.
A second is to create a new system that would ignore where people arrived in the EU and send them around the bloc according to a “permanent distribution key”.
Longer term, the Commission also proposes centralising the entire asylum process within EU institutions, rather than basing it on national laws – though this is very unlikely to find much support among member states for the time being.
“The current system is not sustainable,” the European Commission’s First Vice-President Frans Timmermans said in presenting the proposal. “We need a sustainable system for the future, based on common rules, a fairer sharing of responsibility, and safe legal channels for those who need protection to get it in the EU.”-Reuters