Brussels (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – European member states have instructed Brussels to examine the feasibility of Rwanda-style offshore processing centres for asylum petitioners ahead of an EU summit set to be dominated by migration next week.
The European Commission was notified to work on proposals by the gathered interior ministers of the 27 member states at a session in Luxembourg.
“Offshore hubs were widely cited as the most feasible innovative solution currently on the table,”
an EU diplomat informed The Telegraph.
“So the commission is now assigned to work on them. Quite a big step forward,”
the source expressed before confirming the hubs would be on the schedule of the leaders’ talks in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.
What are the proposed offshore processing centres for asylum seekers?
Italy is set to extend Europe’s first off-shore processing centre in Albania. A few months ago, the EU assumed a sweeping reform of its asylum policies, toughing border procedures and compelling nations to take in refugees from under-pressure states or pay €20,000 for each they deny.
It is a powerful shift for Brussels. In 2018, the EU Commission ruled out offshore hubs, engraving them neither “desirable nor feasible”. Viktor Orban a long-term lover of the UK’s Rwanda plan declared such “immigration hotspots” to be “the only solution” to unlawful migrations and increasing deportations in a speech to the European Parliament on Wednesday.
“Any other solutions are an illusion,” the fiercely anti-migrant prime minister of Hungary informed MEPs in Strasbourg. Left-wing MEPs burst into the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao, which earned them a gentle rebuke from European Parliament president Roberta Metsola who stated: “This is not the Eurovision.”
Around 16 interior ministers were chosen to get “innovative solutions” such as the offshore hubs onto the EU policy-making agenda, despite ethical and legal situations that have stopped similar efforts in the past. “We must not rule out any solution”, France’s new and hardline interior minister Bruno Retailleau expressed as he arrived for the meeting.
