At the end of last week a video with German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed that migration policy is above all a matter of humanity. During a public event the otherwise tough Angela Merkel was literally rendered speechless when she made a Palestinian girl cry. Fourteen-year-old Reem has been living in Germany with her family for four years but under the Dublin Regulation she will most probably have to leave the country. The Chancellor’s matter-of-fact explanation why her family had to go back to Lebanon reduced the girl to tears and all of Merkel’s attempts to quiet her down were in vain.

The video was watched by thousands and triggered a broad discussion of the EU’s migration policy. What is more – after the previous attempt fell through at the beginning of the month, now the EU is expected to retry to reach accord on the quotas for the distribution of refugees.

Against the backdrop of these events, an agreement was signed between the Bulgarian State Agency for Refugees and the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. In the words of the Agency’s chair Nikola Kazakov, the agreement will mean benefits for the country in several spheres:

“The growing migration pressure on Europe and the military conflicts in different parts of the world have resulted in a huge refugee flow. It is the task of all EU countries to address this refugee flow and, together with the member countries, to address this pressure within one common asylum system”, Mr. Kazakov says. “The agreement provides for an exchange of information, of good practices, of experts and other kinds of activities that affect the two agencies. I think that this is the way cooperation can be attained among the EU members – on a bilateral basis within the bounds of the EU that aims to improve communication, to reinforce our efforts to address the refugee pressure.”

“What we need is more solidarity”, said Dr Manfred Schmidt, chair of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees for Radio Bulgaria. In his words only 11 of all 28 members have accepted large numbers of refugees on their territory.

“The quotas are a mathematical model of distribution but what makes me feel ashamed as a European is that the 28 EU members cannot agree on how to distribute no more than 20,000 refugees from Syria, where there is a civil war raging”, says Schmidt. “That is just 20,000 refugees for the whole of the EU with its population of half a billion. So, outside the discussion of quotas, it is simply a matter of solidarity.”

What Nilola Kazakov is expecting of the EU interior ministers’ meeting is a mitigation of the planned quota for Bulgaria of almost 800 refugees – 200 of whom are to settle here and 530 from Greece and Italy – to be relocated. Whatever the outcome of today’s talks, there exists a real risk of some 4,000 refugees currently in Germany being returned to Bulgaria – asylum seekers whose first registration on EU territory was in this country and who, by force of the Dublin Regulation must be admitted here, in Bulgaria. Not long ago a German human rights organization criticized conditions at the refugee centres in this country and their reports have been used as instruments of pressure to leave asylum seekers in Germany. Dr Manfred Schmidt:

“We have an obligation to apply current community law. In the event of any given country exhausting its capacity and being unable to admit any more people, Germany is ready to provide assistance. We should not forget that refugees receive the same amount of protection in Bulgaria as they do in Germany. Still, I do not think it would be a problem for a country with a population of 7 million to take back 4,000 refugees.”

English version: Milena Daynova