Germany and France have proposed giving an EU border force the power -- in theory at least -- to patrol Greece’s frontiers uninvited by Athens in the latest sign of hardening attitudes towards solving Europe’s migration crisis.
The proposal, in a letter sent last week to the EU executive in Brussels on Tuesday, would in principle apply to any member state, not just Greece. But it is driven by frustration that Greek failure to control large numbers arriving by sea is putting the EU’s open-borders Schengen zone at risk.
EU leaders, struggling for unity and facing competing pressures at home, will again discuss the crisis at a summit on December 17.
A draft of conclusions for the summit speaks of “rapidly” fixing failings in border control and of “measures to discourage refusal of registration” by refugees -- the closest official EU language has come to calling for the use of force and detention.
Talk of “Europeanising” frontier defence is also growing.
“In exceptional circumstances, Frontex should be able to deploy rapid reaction teams to the frontiers on its own initiative and under its own responsibility,” the French and German interior ministers, Bernard Cazeneuve and Thomas de Maiziere, wrote to the European Commission last Thursday.
Frontex is the EU agency that coordinates border management.
The Commission is likely to put forward such a plan next week, EU officials say, as part of a package of measures on December 15. It would include a new European Border and Coastguard Agency which could be deployed without a request from the state in question. Frontex currently needs an invitation.
The proposals by Cazeneuve and de Maiziere, who also said Italy and Greece must keep all refugees in “reception centres” for “as long as necessary” to check their claims, were made on a day when Athens was under huge pressure to invite Frontex forces in or face being effectively suspended from the Schengen zone.
A French government source said the letter was not intended to promote new EU measures but to stress a need to implement what has already been agreed. The source said: “It’s a political push that says: ‘We’re now at the time for making decisions and this has to be implemented very quickly’.”