The French President Nicholas Sarkozy has called for a “revision” of the Schengen Agreement threatening to “suspend France’s participation” if a new government policy is not implemented within twelve months.
There is a large pupulation of Rwandans living in France and various countries in Europe. Rwanda has enjoyed historical ties with France, German and Belgium.
The Schengen treaty is intended to guarantee the management of migration by controlling the external borders of Europe, however this relies heavily on neighbouring countries.
Sarkozy threatened to pull France out of the visa-free Schengen zone unless the European Union makes progress on reducing illegal immigration.
The Schengen Agreement is a treaty signed on 14 June 1985 between member states of the European Economic Community.
The treaty was supplemented by the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement 5 years later.
The treaties created Europe’s borderless Schengen Area, which operates very much like a single state for international travel with external border controls for travelling in and out of the area, but with no internal border controls.
Sarkozy recently criticised foreigners in France, made the threat in the hope of destabilising Socialist candidate Francois Hollande who is currently leading in pre-election polls.
400 million Europeans in the Schengen zone can cross borders without a passport. Illegal immigrants who access the area can also take advantage of this ability to move freely between countries.
According to 2010 statistics indicating distribution by continent of origin of third country nationals living in the EU, the largest proportion (36.5 %) were citizens of a European country outside the EU-27 a total of 7.2 million people; among these more than half were citizens of Turkey, Albania or Ukraine.
The second biggest group was from Africa (25.2 %), followed by Asia (20.9 %), the Americas (16.4 %) and Oceania (0.9 %). More than half of the citizens of African countries that were living in the EU were from North Africa.
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