Mr President, I want to talk about two matters on the summit agenda. The first is migration and asylum, the second is the Balkans. I am glad to say that yesterday the Commission gave a cool response to the British proposals to set up refugee detention centres in places like the Balkans because the difficulties of that would be considerable. I agree that there is a need to combat smuggling and trafficking through the orderly and managed arrival of refugees. Ideas like allowing asylum applications to be lodged in the home region, and then to have protected entry or resettlement schemes, are useful to pursue, but these must be complementary to the individual right to seek asylum, not replace it. We must not deny asylum seekers access to European Union territory. The Commission sensibly suggested looking at ways of allowing legal routes for migration. I warmly congratulate the Greek Presidency on its conference on managed migration in Athens last month, because the statistics are stunning: Europe is set to lose 15% of its population by 2050. The US population is going to increase by 40%. Our economies want migrants. The problem is that our societies do not and politicians have to lead an honest and brave debate on all the ramifications of immigration. We must at least agree – and I want the summit to do this – on an integration strategy, including better rights for long-term legal migrants. We must also remove asylum and immigration from the clutches of interior and public order ministers, because those ministers are preoccupied with internal security and repression. They do not have the proper mindset for discussing legal immigration. We have got ourselves into a mess and every repressive measure risks making matters worse. In fact hard borders may have increased the number of illegal immigrants and made them permanent because of the difficulty of going backwards and forwards. So to get order and control back into our asylum and immigration systems, we need three sound policies, not quick fixes and gimmicks: firstly, genuine sharing of responsibility, not shifting responsibility, but sharing both within the European Union and through partnership with countries of origin and local reception countries with substantial financial investment there; secondly, frontloading through investment in better-quality and therefore faster asylum decisions, as the Commission suggests; and lastly, access to legal immigration channels. I do not know the quid pro quo envisaged by the British Government to tempt the Balkan countries into having these refugee camps, but I would like to suggest one topic that requires active and early consideration with the Balkan countries and that is a review of visa policies. As the presidents of the SAP countries said at their summit on Monday, the process of integration could be assisted greatly by offering a genuine hope to their citizens that soon they will be able to travel freely in the whole of Europe. I hope we will look at that soon. To conclude, I want to talk about the International Criminal Court. Romania, and now Albania, have signed US immunity agreements and Bosnia is under pressure. If we are to have a fruitful stabilisation and association process, how come the European Union and associated countries cannot work together to stop the US getting these agreements? Can you assure us there is no intention for European Union states to sign bilateral immunity agreements and that you will not let this process undermine efforts to persuade the Balkan countries to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague? I am sorry to say that other European Union countries have left the UK and the Netherlands holding the line on not ratifying the association agreements until Croatia cooperates. There has been no solidarity among European Union countries and that is disgraceful.

Political group: ELDR