After a long, tense and exhausting period of negotiations, the 27 member states of the European Union finally reached an agreement on Wednesday on rules governing how to act in situations of migration crisis. This is the fifth and final point to be contemplated in the migration and asylum agreement that has been negotiated for years. The Spanish presidency has gone to great lengths to implement legislation that opens up barriers to the pact, realizing that, if this opportunity is lost, the next opportunity will take a long time to materialize. However, the agreement was so fragile that the consensus lasted only 48 hours. The differences expressed by several countries, led by Poland and Hungary, erupted yesterday at a summit of heads of state and government in Grenada, leaving the issue of immigration absent from the joint final declaration.

The deal reached Wednesday was made possible by tightening requirements for requesting asylum, extending the detention time allowed for vulnerable immigrants to be repatriated, and delegating control of the flow of people to neighboring countries that do not guarantee compliance with international conventions on human rights. Objectively, this is important progress, considering that the alternative is to continue experiencing paralysis, but the taste is bittersweet. On the one hand, this is the best pact because it allows us to unblock the abnormal situation that Europe has experienced since the migration emergency of 2015, when the rules set out in the Dublin Convention were dissolved without any alternative of mutual acceptance. which will guarantee solidarity in crisis management. This situation poses serious difficulties for the four countries at the center of the majority of arrivals: Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain.

Far from the initial proposal to articulate a fair and solidarity distribution mechanism for asylum seekers, the agreement provides for a mandatory but flexible system of solidarity. So countries will be able to choose between accepting quotas that suit them or paying 20,000 euros for each application they reject. This is the only way to achieve adequate, although not total, consensus. Poland and Hungary continue to oppose the common policy and are so aggressive that the Hungarian President, Viktor Orbán, even said upon arriving in Granada, with a regretful expression, that they considered themselves “lawfully violated.”