Defending its proposals to introduce qualified majority voting on immigration, visas and asylum yesterday, the European Commission said successive Eurobarometer opinion polls show widespread support for more effective policies in this area among European citizens. Commission president José Manuel Barroso said they had a mandate to deliver concrete results that citizens expected. Such goals demanded commensurate means, he insisted, defending his call that the European Court of Justice be given powers to adjudicate on similar issues.
These are controversial and sensitive proposals which will now be considered by justice and interior ministers at their meeting in Tampere, Finland, in September, where the overall programme for an EU area of freedom, justice and security was launched during the previous Finnish EU presidency in 1999. They challenge member- states to deliver on public expectations about dealing with cross-border crime and pressures arising from international migration, which are best dealt with on an integrated cross-national basis. But governments are especially jealous of their legal sovereignty in this area. Several of them, including the Irish and German governments, are anxious not to allow a creeping cherry-picking of the constitutional treaty to develop from these proposals, which would for the most part be enabled if it were to be ratified. Arising from the latest strategy on the treaty there is a tension between using existing legal powers while waiting for the treaty's fate to be resolved over the next two years.
These proposals usefully play into that political game. It makes good sense for the commission to insist the EU must respond vigorously to demands for more effective approaches to migration, asylum and visas. Just because ratification of the constitution has been delayed, after its rejection last year in France and the Netherlands, it cannot hold up other business. Ireland faces its own problems with these issues, following the huge influx of immigrants and asylum seekers, which creates a demand for better legislation within and without the EU. So do countries such as Spain, faced with a surge of economic immigrants from Africa. The UK and Denmark, which previously resisted such changes in EU law, have now shifted ground on the subject because of changing circumstances.
Given that the timetables for legal changes within existing treaties and decisions on whether to ratify, amend or abandon the new one will converge or coincide between now and 2008, it does not make sense to refuse discussion of these proposals in the meantime.