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The European Union's executive on Wednesday proposed strengthening the bloc's common asylum rules amid a major refugee crisis on the continent that would essentially strike down the so-called Dublin Regulation, under which people must claim asylum in the first EU state they enter.
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The proposal includes two options for changing the current rules. A first option presented by the European Commission would add 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 arrive in the EU and send them around the bloc according to a "permanent distribution key."
"In both cases, asylum-seekers will be automatically redistributed between member states," the bloc's Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told a news conference. "We need a fair share of responsibility and more solidarity ingrained in our system."
In addition the Commission also put forward controversial proposals to strengthen the EU's external borders in order to crackdown on future refugee flow and to counter security threats after deadly attacks in Paris and Brussels.
The proposals would take the burden off frontier countries, in particular Greece and Italy, who have been struggling with massive refugee arrivals over the past few years.
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As expected the proposal received harsh criticism from conservative governments in Eastern Europe, who are against any kind of mandatory resettlement system and have shut their borders to refugees.
"The proposal for reform of the European migration policy is based again on implementing compulsory quotas. We have repeatedly said NO to that," Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec wrote on Twitter.
Last year, Germany took in almost a million refugees. Most of the people, who are fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq and other war zones, want to settle in western European countries such as Germany, Sweden and Norway.
Germany wants to stick to the first point of entry principle but have a permanent relocation scheme in place for asylum-seekers. Italy has pushed for the abolition of the first-country rule.
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Long term, the Commission also proposed a more centralized asylum process within EU institutions, rather than basing it on national laws, though this is unlikely to find much support among member states.
Part of the proposal is also a long-term resettlement scheme to bring people into Europe directly from crisis zones as an alternative to dangerous routes. However, this proposal is also expected to draw mixed reactions from EU states.
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