00:00European leaders have been pushing for tougher migration policies today,
00:04with Denmark and the UK taking a high-profile role in driving a stricter approach across the continent.
00:10Meeting in Brussels, EU ministers have been debating new measures against migrant smuggling,
00:15while in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe has been considering steps that could make deportations easier.
00:22Copenhagen and London have already set the tone.
00:24Their prime ministers were arguing in a joint op-ed for The Guardian that Europe must curb entry for economic migrants.
00:31France 24's reporter in Brussels, Dave Keating, joins us right now.
00:35David, thanks for joining us.
00:36What exactly have European ministers been pushing, both in Brussels and in Strasbourg?
00:44Yeah, there's been a lot of action on the migration front over the past weeks, but it's been a long time in coming.
00:50So, over at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, that's not an EU body, that is a larger organization that includes all of the countries of Europe,
00:58critically, including the UK.
01:01The Danish prime minister, Mehta Friedrichsen, has been pushing for quite some time for a reform of the European Court of Human Rights rules.
01:09She says those rules were set all the way back in the 1950s, and they're not suitable when it comes to rules on asylum for the modern day.
01:18Well, in that, she was joined by the British prime minister, Keir Starmer.
01:21They wrote this joint op-ed in The Guardian newspaper.
01:24Now, they're both from center-left parties, and that's really key here, because they said that, quote,
01:30responsible governments need to act on their citizens' concerns, and that failure to do that would allow populists to win.
01:37So, they really want to show that progressive center-left parties can offer a solution here to try to stop the stem of the tide over to populist parties.
01:49Now, ministers from the Council of Europe are gathered there in Strasbourg today to start discussing this,
01:55but this will be a long process, and there will for sure be a lot of dissenters.
02:00So, this isn't something they're going to be able to do overnight, but British prime minister Keir Starmer has been fighting back criticism from the opposition reform party,
02:10the far-right party in the UK, as well as the center-right conservatives who want the UK to pull out of the ECHR entirely.
02:17He's saying, no, we can work with others to reform it, to stop measures on asylum being blocked by the court.
02:24Then, separately, here in Brussels, we finally had a council agreement on the asylum package that was put out by the Commission a long time ago.
02:34This is a long, long saga. The EU has been trying for many years to reform its asylum policy.
02:41Right now, they're going on rules that date from many, many years ago, the Dublin regulation rules,
02:47which say that countries have to return asylum seekers to their original country of entry.
02:53That has been causing all kinds of problems, but national governments haven't been able to agree on one joint way forward to fix it,
03:02to come up with a new system of asylum rules.
03:05However, this week, they have come to an agreement between national governments to finally get some rules in place,
03:12and that is expected to be approved shortly in a further vote by the European Council of National Governments and the European Parliament.
03:20The bloc was really in the council, so this agreement among member states means that this is finally moving forward.
03:27So I think this does show that Europeans are understanding that citizens are concerned about migration.
03:33However, the problem is doing this in this legal way, it doesn't happen overnight,
03:38and that can make citizens frustrated when they don't see action.
03:41And this is, of course, all in the context of Donald Trump's national security strategy,
03:46which paints Europe as weak and has heavily criticized Europe's migration policies.
03:54Exactly. Now, these recent moves are not due to his comments over the past days
04:00or that national security strategy that was issued by the United States last week.
04:04Like I said, these motions have been in motion for a long time.
04:08However, I'm sure that the countries have this in mind, the European leaders,
04:13when they are taking these votes, when they're discussing this at the European, at the Council of Europe,
04:20they will be keen to present this to Donald Trump as if this is his doing.
04:25That's really what the European leaders have been doing for a year now.
04:28They take things that they were maybe going to do anyway,
04:30like red tape cutting exercise, rowing back on some of the EU's climate rules,
04:35and they tell Donald Trump, we're doing this for you.
04:38We're doing this because you asked us to.
04:41And so I think we can expect, if we do get movement at the Council of Europe and in the EU
04:45to reform immigration rules, again, they're going to tell Donald Trump that it was his doing.
04:51In reality, these are processes that were a long time in coming.
04:54The problem is, it isn't harmless when they do that, when they tell Donald Trump that it's his doing,
04:59because it further gives him the impression that he is the, quote,
05:03president of Europe, as he himself called himself, or earlier this week,
05:07when he pointed out that European leaders call him daddy.
05:10It continues to give this impression that the United States is the most powerful country in Europe,
05:17is running the show in Europe, and indeed,
05:19Politico just named Donald Trump the most powerful man in Europe today.
05:24So this is all feeding into this impression,
05:27even though these migration policies have been in the works for some time.
05:32Dave Keating, I think we'll refrain from calling him daddy here at France 24,
05:37but thank you so much for your outline there on everything that's been going on around migration in Europe.
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