Merkel urges EU ‘common stance’ in refugee crisis

BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel Wednesday urged an EU “common stance” on the migrant crisis and on protecting the bloc’s frontiers, as eastern members move to shut internal borders.

On the eve of an EU summit, Merkel said: “The main thing now is to have a common stance on how to secure the external borders, and here the EU-Turkey plan offers a good solution.”
Merkel, under heavy pressure at home to reduce arrivals, supports a plan under which transit country Turkey would seal its borders and then fly refugees to Europe where they would be settled under an EU quota system.
Merkel said that “we will speak at the upcoming EU Council about how we can work together to protect our external border, and I want us to work together on the EU-Turkish agenda that 28 members have decided.”
She was speaking at a Berlin joint press conference with Sri Lanka’s visiting President Maithripala Sirisena before she was set to address the German Parliament on the EU summit’s topics.
Later, Merkel told Parliament that many of Britain’s demands for EU reforms are “justified and understandable.”
“These are not just about Britain’s individual interests on some issues or questions, rather it’s about several points that are justified and understandable,” she said ahead of a key European summit on the UK’s membership in the bloc.
“Like (British Prime Minister) David Cameron, I believe that it is necessary for the EU to improve our competitiveness, transparency and (reduce) bureaucracy. Germany has shared these concerns for many years,” she said.
Merkel, a decade in power, has seen her long-stellar domestic support drop over her liberal migration policy since more than 1.1 million asylum seekers came to Germany last year.
She has also been increasingly isolated on the EU stage, where even a plan from last year to resettle 160,000 refugees has so far seen only several hundred asylum seekers moved to other EU countries.
Merkel conceded that “the issue of quotas is currently not a priority” for the EU, since the bloc had already agreed on the 160,000 figure and now had to distribute them as agreed, she said.
Even the controversial proposal to curb benefits to European Union migrants in Britain is “justified and understandable because the jurisdiction for each respective social system lies not in Brussels but in each individual member state,” she said.
“Therefore, it is only natural for every member state to be able to protect its social system against abuse.”
Cameron wants to restrict EU migrant workers’ access to benefits such as in-work tax credits, child welfare payments and state-subsidised housing, for a four-year period.
However, many EU member states particularly from the former eastern bloc view this as discriminatory and at odds with the bloc’s principle of free movement.