The EU migration deal explained

Leaders agree plan for European-wide secure
migrant processing facilities following ‘incredibly heated’
all-nighter

In Depth

Following a gruelling nine hours of “often stormy”
overnight talks in Brussels on Thursday, leaders agreed on a
tentative plan of action that will see the opening of secure
processing centres across Europe, Reuters reports.

Would-be asylum seekers whose claims are
rejected will be deported, while those determined to be genuine
refugees will be resettled by EU states on a voluntary
basis.

Other agreements reached at Thursday’s summit
include a deal on shared responsibility for migrants rescued at
sea, which was another of Italy’s key demands.

Countries that function as key transit points on
human smuggling routes into Europe, such as Turkey and Morocco,
will also receive extra funding to strengthen their
borders.

Many of the finer details of the deal, such as
where the processing centres will be located or how countries will
share the burden of resettlement, remain vague.

But even a vague agreement is a
better-than-expected outcome for a summit that European Council
President Donald Tusk himself admitted was “incredibly
heated”.

“Diplomats described a tense, tortured meeting with
small groups of leaders huddled together in a desperate bid to
break the deadlock,” HuffPost reports.

Although the number of migrants seeking refuge
in Europe has slowed dramatically since peaking in 2015, the issue
remains deeply divisive.

The influx of migrants has exposed economic, social
and political tensions that run deeper than the current crisis,
says the BBC’s Katya Adler.

Northern European nations suspect their poorer
neighbours to the south and east of turning a blind eye to migrants
passing through en route to wealthier countries, while “Italy and
Greece smoulder with resentment at having been left alone to deal
with migrant arrivals”.

Italy’s new prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, has
said that calls for migrants to be processed in the first EU
country that they arrive in put an unfair burden on his nation.
Prior to the summit, he vowed to veto any prospective deal that did
not alleviate Italy’s burden.

However, proposals to distribute asylum seekers
proportionally among member states have been met with point-blank
refusal by nationalist governments in central and eastern
Europe.

Emerging from the talks at 5am local time,
Merkel – who has faced intense pressure at home to take a harder
line on migration – sought to assure reporters that the tentative
deal was a “good signal” of cooperation among member
states.

EU leaders now have “a lot of work to do to
bridge the different views”, she acknowledged.