PARIS (Reuters) – France will push for motion on migration when it hosts the European Union presidency from January, President Emmanuel Macron was quoted as saying on Thursday, and he vowed to rapidly crack down on unlawful migrant camps in northern France.
France takes the rotating presidency of the EU in six weeks’ time simply because the bloc is confronted by a brand new disaster with Belarus engineering main migrant flows https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-migrants-try-enter-poland-belarus-east-west-standoff-2021-11-18 by flying them from the Center East and pushing them to aim to illegally cross its borders into Poland and Lithuania.
In an interview with the northern French regional newspaper la Voix du Nord, Macron mentioned ministers would act within the coming weeks.
“We should take a number of actions: stop the institution of lasting camps, act to dismantle the smuggling networks and strengthen work with the international locations of origin to stop these flows,” he mentioned. “I’ll carry reforms below the French presidency of the EU.”
The bloc has been deeply divided for years on the difficulty.
The EU’s reluctant jap members, the prosperous northern states the place lots of the newcomers aspire to stay, and the Mediterranean-shore international locations the place they primarily arrive have been clashing over the place to find folks for the reason that 2015 migration disaster confirmed current EU migration guidelines had been insufficient.
European diplomats say discovering compromises to these divisions through the French EU presidency is more likely to show much more tough provided that the same old six-month mandate will probably be overshadowed by the French presidential elections.
For Macron, showing to behave on migration is essential provided that conservative and far-right events will search to focus a part of the controversy on the migrant concern, one thing on which he’s deemed weaker.
With some 22,000 migrants crossing the Channel this 12 months, Macron additionally mentioned there was an issue between London and Paris.
“We’ve the British, who oscillate between partnership and provocation. We have to additional strengthen collaboration,” Macron mentioned. “If those that wish to be part of Britain have household there, it have to be a part of household reunification. If they’re smuggled, we’ve to interrupt this method.”
(Reporting by John Irish in Paris; Enhancing by Matthew Lewis)
