Switzerland expects ‘no miracle’ in upcoming asylum talks with Italy

Baume-Schneider said it was important to state that Switzerland expects Italy to respect the Dublin agreement. © Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

Swiss Justice Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider will meet Italy's interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, in Rome on Wednesday to discuss Italy’s refusal to take back asylum-seekers under the Dublin agreement.

Baume-Schneider said she was not optimistic that the country will end its temporary suspension of the agreement, which stipulates that the first state through which a migrant passes is responsible for processing the asylum application. Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union, is a signatory to the Dublin agreement.

“I’m not expecting a miracle,” the minister told the German-language newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende. “The situation in southern Italy is really difficult.”

Last December Italy announced it would temporarily stop taking back asylum-seekers who had first travelled through its territory, because it no longer had the capacity to receive the large numbers of refugees arriving through the Mediterranean.

Baume-Schneider said it was important to state that Switzerland expects Italy to respect the Dublin agreement. She plans to raise the subject of possible financial support from Bern for migration projects in Italy, but added money was not an expectation of the Italians. “The decision to block the readmission of asylum-seekers was taken for domestic political reasons,” she told the newspaper.

In March Switzerland signed a joint declaration with other states in the Schengen zone to reform the rules governing asylum. At the time, Baume-Schneider told a ministerial meeting in Brussels that only a third of migrants were being transferred to the first country of reception under the Dublin agrement – a low rate that she said was weakening the credibility of the system.