There are three observations by the president of Cime, Pier Virgilio Dastoli, on the results of the Council of Ministers of the Interior on 22 September:
– the relocation concerns 120000 refugees and asylum seekers currently in Italy and Greece and in 12 months Italy will be able to send a part of the 54000 refugees "remaining pending" to other countries. The emergency looms and the Council has given refractory countries one year to accept quotas of refugees. Strange way to conceive the emergency!
– International institutions (last in order of time is the OECD) tell us that the flow of migrants – who are fleeing wars, for which European governments are also responsible for the unfortunate policies they have implemented in recent years – and from hunger also caused by the non-compliance with the millennium objectives – it is not an emergency but an epochal fact that will last for years. Calculations of how many potential migrants there are in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Libya are known and, faced with these calculations, the figure of 120000 people is the result of a cynical and mocking vision.
– They wrote that yesterday's qualified majority voting is a "historic decision" and that it paves the way for political Europe. Strange way of reasoning if a decision not only envisaged by a Treaty which entered into force in 2009 (art. 78) but above all obligatory for all institutional actors is judged historic: for the presidency of the EU Council which is obliged to vote, for the Commission which has the power to ask for a vote on one of its texts (but yesterday the EU Council voted on a text of the presidency different from that of the Commission) and for individual governments which can ask the presidency to let them vote. The anomaly does not lie in yesterday's majority vote but in the non-vote of 14 September (who in that Council decided not to vote and why?). Let's see what will happen at the European Council when borders and Schengen are discussed to see how many steps forward there will still be towards political Europe.
