EU Council agrees to Spain's Middle East peace conference proposal

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00:00 And for more, let's cross to our correspondent Dave Keating in Brussels.

00:03 So when it comes to these conclusions, Dave, on the Middle East, there was a proposal for

00:07 a peace conference.

00:09 What can you tell us about that?

00:12 Yeah, this peace conference that Macron was just talking about there was actually thrown

00:17 in at the last minute.

00:19 It was a push from Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who was not happy about the

00:24 language being watered down about what they would have liked to see, a ceasefire, that

00:29 wasn't acceptable to some countries, including Germany and Austria.

00:33 They were then moving on to the word "pause," a humanitarian pause, but Germany still said

00:37 pause was going to tie Israel's hands too much, so they had to change it to "pause is."

00:42 Now, Spain almost didn't sign the conclusions because of that, but in the end, they relented

00:47 because they added this call for an international peace conference.

00:51 And Spain clearly wants to take the lead on that.

00:53 There's talks about that peace conference happening in Madrid, because that's where

00:58 a big Middle East peace conference happened in 1991, settling Israel-Palestinian issues,

01:03 or trying to settle Israel-Palestinian issues.

01:07 The issue is nobody seems to know exactly what this means.

01:10 We keep being told it would happen soon.

01:12 No one will define what soon is.

01:14 President Macron was speaking quite positively about the idea there in his press conference.

01:19 I was there at the press conference, then I went next door to German Chancellor Olaf

01:23 Schultz's press conference.

01:25 He was asked about the peace conference.

01:27 He seemed to be downplaying it.

01:29 He was saying, look, something like that needs a lot of work, a lot of preparation.

01:33 He seemed to be saying it would be a long ways off.

01:35 So clearly, there's some countries that are more enthusiastic about that idea than others,

01:40 but it was a big victory for Spain to get that language in there, because a lot of countries

01:44 weren't very enthusiastic about it, it seems, including Germany.

01:48 In the meantime, Dave, EU leaders covered a lot of ground during this two-day summit.

01:52 What were the big takeaways aside from the war in the Middle East?

01:57 Well, today they talked about Ukraine and migration.

02:01 That discussion on Ukraine and migration, both of those discussions were supposed to

02:05 happen yesterday, but that debate over the Palestine-Israel conflict, which really splits

02:11 EU member states, that took five hours yesterday and it pushed Ukraine into, it made the summit

02:16 have to go into overtime today.

02:17 It wasn't supposed to keep going this morning.

02:19 This was just supposed to be the Eurozone today.

02:22 So that is kind of a metaphor for what's happening here, in that Ukraine is getting pushed off

02:26 the agenda by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

02:30 All of the EU leaders were very keen to say today the EU can do two things at once.

02:35 They are not going to get distracted by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

02:38 In fact, in the conclusions that they just adopted, they say they will continue helping

02:43 Ukraine for as long as it takes.

02:45 But they had the awkward presence there of the new Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico,

02:49 who has just ended his country's military aid to Ukraine yesterday.

02:53 That was a campaign promise in the election last month.

02:56 He and Viktor Orban want the West to stop helping Ukraine, and they say that would end

03:01 the war and end the suffering.

03:02 In other words, because Russia would win.

03:05 So there is that awkward presence.

03:07 However, it was very noteworthy today that Robert Fico did not try to veto the conclusions

03:12 on Ukraine that said that the EU will continue militarily arming the country.

03:19 So that gave a signal about maybe he's not going to be as difficult as some had feared

03:24 on this topic.

03:25 Then on migration, the Swedish and Belgian Prime Ministers were hoping to get an explicit

03:29 link between the risk of terrorism and the EU failing to tackle its migration problems,

03:36 basically failing to update its migration framework.

03:39 Of course, two Swedish citizens were killed here in Brussels last week in a terrorist

03:43 attack.

03:44 So both of the Belgian and the Swedish Prime Ministers were keen to get language in the

03:48 conclusions calling on the returns directive to be passed urgently.

03:52 Right now it's stuck in the legislative process that would make it easier for countries to

03:56 send people whose asylum applications, for instance, had been rejected.

03:59 That was the case for the Brussels attacker last week.

04:02 However, a number of countries didn't like the idea of linking terrorism with migration,

04:07 and that was shelved.

04:09 So the language on the migration text didn't change during today's discussion.

04:13 Okay.

04:14 Our correspondent Dave Keating reporting for us from Brussels.

04:17 Dave, thanks as always.

04:18 (explosion)

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