The leaders of France and Italy are meeting in Rome today (26 April) to discuss measures to tighten EU border controls amid rising tensions over how to deal with the thousands of migrants fleeing revolutions in north Africa.
HONOR MAHONY | EUOBSERVER
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi are expected to use this 29th bilateral summit to call for a partial reintroduction of border controls, a move that would undermine one of the most significant integration steps of the European Union.
"Europe is not the free movement of illegal immigrants," Laurent Wauquiez, French European affairs minister told Journal du Dimanche.
"France wants to study the possibility of restoring border controls if there is a major influx at the gates of the Union," he said.
Referring to the EU’s agreement on abolishing internal borders, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told daily Il Sole 24 Ore: "All treaties inevitably grow old. The Berlin wall of North Africa has come down and the context in which these treaties and I think also the Lisbon treaty, were written has changed radically."
Although France has said it does not want to "suspend" the Schengen Agreement but just "review" it, the mere fact that it is being discussed at all is of significant symbolic importance.
The 1995 agreement, allowing passport-free travel in 25 European countries and affecting 400 millions citizens, is seen as one of the deepest integration moves in the EU’s history, breaking the down national borders and resting on trust between member states.
Full article you can find here: http://euobserver.com/9/32229
