Berlin calls itself ‘locomotive’ of European crackdown on immigration, expelling 81 Afghans before meeting.Germany’s interior minister has hosted five of his European counterparts to discuss ways of tightening the region’s asylum rules, as his country deported 81 Afghans to their Taliban-controlled homeland.
The European Union’s immigration system needed to be “tougher and stricter”, Minister Alexander Dobrindt said after Friday’s meeting in southern Germany with the interior ministers of France, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Denmark, as well as EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner.
The cohort issued a five-page communique on their aims, which included the establishment of “return hubs” for holding people outside the EU, enabling asylum procedures in third countries, and allowing deportations to Afghanistan and Syria as standard practice.
All measures would require approval from Brussels.
“When we analyse what has been agreed here, it’s lofty ambitions, but not much detail about how they intend to pursue what’s in these five pages,” said Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Berlin.
Ministers, he said, had talked about “the sorts of things that they agree on, but they know they can’t implement them themselves as unilateral decisions.”
Speaking after the meeting, Dobrindt said, “We wanted to send a signal that Germany is no longer sitting in the brakeman’s cab on migration issues in Europe, …
