00:00Dr. Ruvie Ziegler is Associate Professor in International Refugee Law at the University of Reading.
00:05Professor, welcome. So, was there consensus among EU ministers?
00:10I mean, most seem to praise Spain's handling, Spain's response.
00:18Right, I mean, look, I think we need to acknowledge two things first.
00:23First is that there were people who were trying to cross into a European Union country that is a signatory
00:30of the Refugee Convention,
00:31and 75 of them have died in the process, as your reporter said.
00:36The second is that the reason they were trying to cross into Spain in this way is because it's ordinarily
00:45impossible for them to do what you would expect people to try and do,
00:49which is to come to a border crossing and claim asylum there.
00:53And the reason that is the case is that Morocco generally, in collaboration with Spain and the European Union,
01:00prevents people who come from the rest of Africa from doing exactly this.
01:05So this was an unusual occasion, and the Spanish response to it was to return virtually everyone into Morocco.
01:13Whether that's legal or not under even the Spanish constitutional courts ruling, I think is a very important question to
01:22be asking.
01:23But it's not surprising European Union ministers are happy, because Spain ultimately has some early deported people who are already
01:31in Spanish territory.
01:32So this Schengen area, this free movement area, was not compromised, in that no one was able to cross from
01:39Ceuta to mainland Europe.
01:41So why are countries so critical of Spain?
01:48Well, I mean, as you and your reporter have noted, Ceuta actually has a special arrangement under Schengen.
01:56So as a general rule, even though Ceuta is in Spain and as a result in the European Union and
02:01in the Schengen area,
02:03there are already always checks that prevent people from crossing into the mainland.
02:10So there was virtually no chance, even if people had remained in Ceuta, of people making it into other EU
02:16member states without a check.
02:18So the response of countries like Italy had no factual basis.
02:23They really played into a wider sentiment of trying to enact a form of migration control.
02:32Of course, suspension temporarily of Schengen arrangement is something we have seen in the past.
02:38We've seen it famously in the 2015 refugee crisis, when Germany enacted temporarily border controls with Austria,
02:48and then various other European countries have followed.
02:51So it is something that Schengen countries sometimes do.
02:54But on this occasion, it just had no factual basis for doing so.
02:59Very, very briefly, the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, before this meeting took place,
03:04said that stronger EU borders were needed after the Ceuta crisis.
03:09Is she right?
03:11I don't think so.
03:13I think fundamentally the Frontex budget, which is the EU agency dealing with EU borders,
03:20has a budget of over a billion euro.
03:24There are multiple arrangements with countries in North Africa,
03:27and they tend to work to the extent that they prevent people from crossing into the European Union.
03:32What the EU needs is a model by which people can apply for asylum from outside the European Union
03:38in a legal and safe way and not have to rely on smugglers and traffickers.
03:43Dr. Ruby Ziegler, thank you.
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