A new five year programme on legal cooperation within the EU will be high on the agenda during the Swedish EU presidency. The programme covers a wide span of collaborations including how to deal with inter-European criminals and with asylum seekers.
The current Hague Programme started in autumn 2004 and will run out by the end of the year. It will be replaced with the Stockholm Programme.
Swedish Minister for Justice Beatrice Ask is one of two government ministers who will be working on the Stockholm programme. Ask says that the Stockholm programme will cover a wide area of EU legal collaboration, including police cooperation, the sharing of information, as well as guidelines to interaction between legal institutions. Criminal and civil law will also be included, as will immigration policy. The other is Minister is therefore Tobias Billström, Minister for Migration.
The EU commision wants the EU to share policies on asylum seekers to guarantee solidarity between the member states. Although no country have so far objected to this, there is no doubt that there is currently a big difference between how asylumseekers are treated in different European countries.
There are a handful of rules today, but how they are applied depends very much on the country. For example, Norway no longer sends back anyone arriving from Greece as they are deeply critical to the way asylum seekers are treated there.
Despite the conflicts between member states, Tobias Billström still believes that it will be possible to come to an agreement on immigration policy.
Radio Sweden’s Rebecca Martin has more.
The Stockholm Programme (3:06): http://www.sr.se/webbradio/?Type=db&Id=1832037