7 minute read
Gerald Knaus, Berlin
We can find European solutions that work Borders, migration and refugee policy – how Europe fails
A paradox lies at the heart of the current debate on migration in Europe. The number of people arriving irregularly across the Mediterranean in 2018 has fallen sharply in comparison with 2015. This has led some to argue that the “refugee crisis” is over and that the EU has learned its lessons. However, populists ideologically long opposed to the European Union itself and who blame “Brussels” have done well in a string of national elections in 2018. They paint the picture of a looming threat which only drastic policy measures can contain. What is the reality of Europe’s current migration crisis? Is there a crisis at all? We asked the founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), Gerald Knaus, who is travelling around Europe presenting proposals for a “humane, implementable policy on borders.” In 2015, his think tank suggested the blueprint for what became, in March 2016, the EU-Turkey statement that drastically reduced arrivals by boat in the Aegean.
Interview with Gerald Knaus, Founding chairman, European Stability Initiative (ESI), Berlin
The European: Mr Knaus, in September 2015 you warned that the loss of control at the EU’s external border in the Aegean was unsustainable and suggested that the best way to reduce irregular arrivals in line with international law was an agreement between Germany and Turkey. This became EU policy six months later. In June 2018, you suggested European reception centres in Spain to reduce the number of irregular arrivals. How confident are you that this time, too, your idea might be adopted? It does not look likely at the moment. Gerald Knaus: The situation in the Western Mediterranean today is like a magnifying glass, where we see everything that is wrong in European debates and policies. First, the total number of people who crossed the Mediterranean this year – to Spain, Italy and Greece – is less than 300 a day in the first nine months. This is a sharp decrease and no unmanageable invasion. However, 2018 will also have seen around 60,000 people cross the sea only to Spain, which is more than in any year in the past two decades! Three years ago, only one tenth of this number arrived in Spain by boat, and neither the Spanish reception system nor the asylum system can cope. Also, nobody has any plan regarding what to do. Europe has lost control, again.
The European: You suggested European reception centres in Spain. How would this help? Gerald Knaus: What Spain needs today is the ability to send back those who arrive and who do not need protection, and to do so quickly to reduce the incentive to come. Currently it is almost impossible to send even the smallest number back to their countries of origin. It requires an asylum system that can make decisions that are fair and fast, and agreements that work. The European: Could any asylum system cope with such arrivals? Gerald Knaus: In 2017 the total number of first instance decisions in Spain was 13,300 and still there was a huge backlog at
Gerald Knaus
Spain after a chosen date is returned – this can be achieved. If West Africans know that there is an 80 percent chance of being returned within weeks, they will stop crossing the sea. Right now, that chance is close to zero. The European: But will countries of origin cooperate? Gerald Knaus: It depends on what they are offered, and on what they are asked to do. If countries take back a limited number to stop the flow and are offered legal quotas for migration, it would be in their interest. Turkey, the country in the world with the highest number of refugees today, made the EU such an offer in 2016. This is what diplomacy is for. The third pillar, of course, is that those who are not returned are relocated from such European centres to other European countries. In 2016 and 2017, some EU members relocated 20,000 people from Greece. It can be done, if there is the will. The European: So what is likely to happen instead? Gerald Knaus: The far-right has a simple message: Europe faces an invasion, this cannot be stopped with legal methods, Europe must abolish the right to claim asylum and must be more brutal, including letting people drown who might be rescued. Those who oppose this thinking as un-European must show that there is a humane way to reassert control. The message must be: there is no invasion, we can reduce irregular arrivals without abandoning the right to asylum and we can reduce deaths at sea. We can find European solutions that work. In early 2016, the number of arrivals on the Greek islands fell from 2,000 a day to 50. We need to put our best administrative and legal minds together now and create a system that combines control and human rights. But this is not what we are doing at this moment. Spain and Greece are where Europe must prove its ingenuity today. It is a hugely important test and right now we are failing. The European: Mr Knaus, thank you very much for having shared your views with us and our readers. The interview was directed by Nannette Cazaubon, Deputy-Editor-in-Chief. > web: www.esiweb.org the end of the year. If everyone who arrives this year applies, it would add 60,000. Including appeals in courts, it would take years. Thus, if you reach Algeciras, the coastal town in the South of Spain, closed to Gibraltar, today and apply for asylum you can stay for years. In reality, though, most who arrive via the sea will not bother to apply for asylum as they will in any case not be returned to their country. Instead many will head to France. France has many more asylum applications this year than in 2015, also a new record. For Spain and France, 2015 was no crisis. It is now, in 2018, that they don’t know what to do. And in 2019 we have the European elections. All Europeans need a plan, fast. The European: What is the plan you have been advocating recently? Gerald Knaus: The system that Spain, France, Greece, and the whole EU needs relies on three pillars: asylum, returns and relocation. The first is the ability to decide upon arrival, within weeks, who needs international protection in the EU and who does not. Some say this cannot be done. That a coalition of European states cannot create a system to deal with 300 people a day, a number that would also fall fast if we had such a system, is unacceptable defeatism. Of course, it would require resources and some changes in institutions, but given how much is at stake – lives lost daily at sea, control lost at borders, the future of support for human rights and indeed for an EU that respects human rights – it is flabbergasting that there is not more serious planning for a European system of fast and quality asylum at the entry points. The European: What is the second pillar? Gerald Knaus: While processing claims, we must accommodate people humanely – unlike today on the Greek islands, where pregnant women will spend another winter in tents in the snow. We also need the cooperation of countries of origin to take back their citizens from these European centres if they do not get protection. This is crucial. And countries will not do this unless they see it as in their interest. If a cut-off date is fixed – if everyone who does not need protection and arrives in Gerald Knaus is ESI’s founding chairman. He spent five years working for NGOs and international organisations in Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 2001 to 2004, he was the director of the Lessons Learned Unit of the EU Pillar of the UN Mission in Kosovo. In 2011, he co-authored, alongside Rory Stewart, the book “Can Intervention Work?” He has also co-authored more than 80 ESI reports as well as scripts for 12 TV documentaries on south-eastern Europe. He is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and for five years he was an Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, where he was a Visiting Fellow in 2010/2011 lecturing on state building and intervention. Twitter; @rumeliobserver.
