EU 'reception centre' setback

Europeans are to get biometric passports before the end of 2006 but deep divisions remain over calls for asylum transit camps on the EU's borders, after a meeting of the G5 group.

Justice ministers from Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain have backed high-tech digital passports that will see all EU citizens routinely fingerprinted “before the end of 2006”.

The anti-terror security move will comply with US visa demands and see fingerprint and face recognition data embedded on microchips within EU passports.

But the five countries failed to make any progress on reheated proposals to set up transit camps for EU-bound refugees, a situation effectively killing the plan off at a European level.

A Florence summit hosted by Italian interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu has debated calls to set up “reception centres” in North Africa to process asylum seekers before they land on EU soil.

Deep divisions between Pisanu, Germany’s Otto Schily and the UK’s David Blunkett versus French justice minister Dominique de Villepin and Spain’s Antonio Alonso emerged.

Le Monde reports a French source warning that such camps could become a magnet for terrorists, provide a false sense of security, and reproduce the control problems of the Sangatte refugee centre.

“To make camps would amount to recreating Sangatte and the Maginot line with perverse effects, in particular, possible terrorist recruitment, the actions of mafia and traffickers whose first victims would be these underprivileged populations,” the newspaper reports.

French justice minister De Villepin described the proposal as “a false good idea that will create more problems that it solves”.

And Spanish minister Alonso highlighted “fears that these camps could become places where human rights would not be respected”.

“We have not found a solution to the fundamental points and those are: who ends up in these centres, who is looking for political asylum, who is fleeing poverty, who will run them? And what do the countries who must host think?,” he said.
 
In an newspaper interview, Libya's prime minister Shoukri Ghanem made Tripoli’s opposition clear.

“It does not seem to us a good idea to put illegal immigrants into camps in certain countries. You must instead help them to remain where they are, and do something about creating jobs,” he told Corriere della Sera.

Germany – sensitive over historical associations of the word ‘camp’ – pushed ministers to adopt the term “reception centre”.

Schily told colleagues that it was regrettable that debate had assumed ideological implications.

The failure by the five to agree the proposal, originally floated by the UK in spring 2003, is likely to doom any further EU-wide discussions.

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