The European Union is highly interested in signing agreements with the governments of the developing countries regarding the return of illegal migrants to their territories. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany informed about it a group of Belarusian journalists in the course of their visit to Berlin within the framework of an educational programme in the end of June. According to the data of the German Foreign Ministry, eleven agreements in question were concluded to the moment, including Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and a number of Balkan countries. The EU also realizes the necessity to improve the cooperation on the issues related to fighting illegal migration and border security within the European Union. In order to fulfill this goal, a special service for protection of marine borders, in particular, in the Mediterranean region, as well as a border agency in Warsaw tasked to ensure information exchange between the EU Member States, were set up.

The German Foreign Ministry also stressed that it was equally important to provide for the border security and to protect the rights of political refugees. Therefore the process of setting up a unified European System of treating refugees is ongoing. The unification of the national systems started five years ago and currently the EU has already elaborated legislation, providing for minimal standards related to the procedure of treating refugees and granting them with asylum. In compliance with the Dublin Treaty, a refugee should be treated by the EU Member State, which the refugee entered initially. The basic international document related to the refugee status is the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and other documents adopted on its basis.

The German Foreign Ministry stands for further broader cooperation between the bodies granting asylum and for harmonization of the rights of refugees in this area in the EU countries. At the same time Germany is ‘rather skeptical’ about the idea to establish a Unified European Agency on Refugee matters and other bodies, aiming at centralization of all existing structures dealing with the refugee issues. The German Foreign Ministry believes that it would be necessary to improve the quality of services of the already existing bodies.

There were 192 thousand individuals seeking for asylum in 2006 in 27 EU Member States, according to the Eurostat data. In the course of the past five years, the number of refugees in the EU Member States was slowly decreasing.