Regulating Dublin II - The Best from Greece

The demands of French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi for a revised Schengen agreement is a manifestation of the grave disease that Europe is suffering from.

After decades of important milestones and great struggle for the European integration, today's national leaders are proven to be incompetent to face crises like the ones resulting from the North African and Middle East revolts without resorting to extreme populist politics.


Sarkozy and Berlusconi's demands with regards to the Schengen agreement are simply the results of the challenges that the two centre-right European leaders are facing from the far right in their countries.



At the all time low of their popularity, they are taking advantage of the ever more popular euroscepticism throughout Europe, by striking at the very root of the European political union: free movement.



Instead of working on the coordination of national asylum policies and the fair sharing of the relocation and distribution of the immigrants and the immigration funding, the two European leaders prefer the easy but dangerous solution of the selective reintroduction of the old European internal border checks.


The need to “preserve in the European citizens’ consciousness the principal of free movement” is the pretext that they use in their letter to the European Commission, in which they are asking for a revision to the Schengen agreement. They choose to forget two things:



First, that there is not need for a revision of the Schengen agreement, as the agreement, which was signed in 1985 and became effective in 1995, explicitly states at article 2, paragraph 2 that any country facing extreme difficulties or national security threats can reinforce the border checks for a specific period of time.



Second, along with the Schengen provisions, any country can enforce the Commission's directive regarding the reception of refugees (not immigrants), whose lives are under severe threat. Their reception can be restricted to a specific timeframe, a specific place and other specialised conditions.



EU is under huge pressure to take measures against the international and European acquis, because of the recent rise in xenofobic populism in the Alpic countries and the successes of the European far right.


The Greek government is justified in insisting that there is no need for any changes to the Schengen agreement and what is needed instead is a revision of the Dublin II agreements. And it rightly emphasises the fact that the Franco-Italian summit makes a revised Dublin II ever more important.



Greece and the other countries of the European South are under pressure to agree on a very painful compromise: “If you want a revised Dublin II, you have to agree to a revision of the Schengen agreement and the temporary return of internal borders,” say the countries of Central and Northern Europe.


Schengen, a pillar of the European Union, has nothing to do with the Dublin II.

The latter states that the country of entry of an illegal immigrant -- not a refugee -- it is the one responsible for their repatriation.



Dublin II, which was voted by the Greek parliament in 2003, has proved extremely inefficient in the management of the immigration problem, as all the pressure is put on the shoulders of the countries that are at the external EU borders. Greece is one of them, accepting more than 90% of the illegal immigrants entering Europe.



Until now, the countries of Central and Northern Europe refuse to share the costs associated with illegal

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