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Britain Pushes For Tougher EU Immigration Policy
STOCKHOLM, Feb 8 (News Agencies) - Britain said Thursday tougher measures were needed to crack down on opportunistic "asylum-seekers" and on human trafficking in the European Union.
British Home Secretary Jack Straw, making the proposals at an informal two-day meeting here of EU justice and interior ministers tackling immigration, asylum and human trafficking problems, also suggested the EU take the fight to countries on the 15-nation bloc's periphery - several of which want to join the EU.
"We now know that 60% of all illegal immigrants to western Europe come through the Balkans," Straw said.
"There are about 50,000 Chinese nationals in Belgrade alone," he told a press conference, "and I have reports of planeload after planeload of young single men arriving in Sarajevo from elsewhere in eastern Europe and western Asia.
"They come as asylum seekers, but in fact they are work seekers," he said, adding that Britain and Italy had proposed sending EU police and immigration teams to work with local authorities in the Balkans to head off the illicit traffic.
He said at least 10 EU countries had agreed to send senior immigration officials to a meeting in London next Monday to advance the idea.
Straw denied the proposal risked creating a "fortress Europe" but said that while the EU should maintain a "generous" attitude toward eastern European immigrants, it also needs to crack down on asylum shoppers and the criminal gangs trafficking in human beings.
He pitched for sharper targeting of the criminal gangs that transport immigrants across Europe under inhuman conditions for rich fees into uncertain, often worse situations than they fled.
Maj-Inger Klingvall, asylum and immigration minister of Sweden, which holds the current EU presidency, said justice and home affairs ministers from the 13 countries applying for EU membership had been invited to a ministerial meeting on March 16th in Brussels to talks about solutions.
"This is crucial because so many people are flooding into member states and it transpires that a lot of them, mainly women and children, come from the candidate countries," she said.
"We will be discussing what happens after accession [to the EU] but also what happens before negotiations are completed."
Straw said most of his fellow ministers had welcomed Britain's proposals for rethinking the implementation of the 1951 U.N. Convention on Human Rights to reflect 50 years of change in the world, and the 1997 Dublin Convention which obliges the first EU country an asylum seeker enters to process the application.
The Dublin accord has not been working as intended, he said, with many countries turning a blind eye as asylum-seekers transit to third countries in what he termed "asylum shopping" for the warmest welcome and best social benefits.
Mary Robinson, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has already rejected any tampering with the 1951 U.N. convention, but Straw stressed Britain had no wish to "depart from the basic principle ... to give asylum to those fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution.
"What we have to do," he added, "is modernize the practices, because the world is a very different one today than it was in 1951."
In a speech in London last Tuesday, Straw said he wanted EU immigration rules tightened to ensure that refugees, particularly from the western Balkans, made their asylum claims in their first EU ports of entry and not be shunted westward to countries, like Britain, where social benefits and attitudes might be more attractive.
The reforms sought "should make it easier to return people to the first EU country in which they arrive," said Straw. "In addition, we need to send a strong signal to the traffickers that no matter where they operate in Europe the penalties they face will be harsh."
The burgeoning traffic in women and children for sexual and work exploitation was a top item on the Friday's agenda.
Sweden, holding its first EU presidency since joining the union in 1995, is sensitive to what it calls "this modern version of slavery."
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