72,000 people crossed into Ceuta in two days. Three months on, Brussels is still choosing between three options for a ‘framework’.

At the end of July, more than 72,000 people entered Ceuta irregularly from Morocco. That figure comes from Spain's interior minister, as cited this week by the EU's own Fundamental Rights Agency. Politico puts it at more than 70,000 in 48 hours. Either way, a small Spanish city on the African coast took in a crowd the size of a football stadium in two days.

That was nearly three months ago. On Thursday, EU diplomats were due to discuss what Europe should do the next time it happens. According to a Council note seen by Rapporteur, they were to be handed three options for a "European Emergency Response Framework". Nobody has yet decided whether that framework will even be law.

The pact that was supposed to be the answer

It is worth remembering what Brussels promised. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, years in the negotiating, has applied in full since 12 June 2026. It was sold as the end of improvisation: common screening, border procedures, solidarity, and yes, built-in crisis rules for sudden mass arrivals and for the "instrumentalisation" of migrants by hostile states.

Seven weeks after it started to apply, Ceuta happened. And the reaction from the people who wrote the pact has been, essentially, to start writing another one.

In her State of the Union speech in September, Ursula von der Leyen promised an emergency framework allowing "time-limited and strictly defined flexibility in standard procedures", according to Politico. At last week's summit, she said a proposal would come before the end of the year. "We will always uphold our values and fundamental rights, but we will never compromise on protecting our borders," she said. It is a good sentence. It is also a sentence, delivered twelve weeks after the crossings.

Meanwhile, Rapporteur reports, some capitals are already asking the Commission for a legislative package to "simplify" the pact by mid-2027. The flagship reform has not reached its first birthday, and member states are filing amendments.

Three options and a trigger nobody wants to pull

The Council note's three options are revealing. Should the emergency framework cover every case of instrumentalisation? Only instrumentalisation that threatens a mass influx? Or every mass influx, even where nobody can prove a foreign government engineered it?

That last option is the honest one, and it is why it is controversial. In real life, governments almost never have proof of a hostile state's intent while the crowd is still at the fence. If Europe's emergency brake only works once lawyers have established that Rabat, Minsk or Moscow did it deliberately, it will work too late, every time.

Several capitals, Berlin and Vienna among them, back allowing governments to suspend asylum procedures temporarily, Rapporteur reports. The idea came from Greece. Others warn it is illegal. The Commission, according to earlier Rapporteur reporting, has leaned towards guidance that would give national governments political and legal cover to act themselves.

Notice what that means. When the crisis comes, the decisions will be taken in Madrid, Athens or Warsaw, under national law, by ministers who answer to voters. Brussels' contribution is a permission slip. Then the question writes itself: why does this take a year?

The agency that counts the guards

Into this debate, on Thursday, came the Fundamental Rights Agency's quarterly bulletin. Some of what it says should trouble anyone. At least 852 people died or went missing on routes to Europe between July and September, it reports, citing the International Organization for Migration. Media reports suggest at least 88 died trying to swim to Ceuta. Those deaths are a reason to control the border better, not an argument against controlling it.

But the agency's emphasis is telling. One headline finding is that 12 member states opened at least 322 preliminary criminal investigations into alleged rights violations at borders between 2020 and 2025, and only nine ended in convictions. Ineffective investigations, FRA warns, risk creating "a perception of impunity". Another is that five countries, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland and Sweden, had not yet designated the independent monitoring body the pact requires by the end of September.

These are legitimate things for a rights agency to track. Still, it is a picture of where the EU's institutional energy goes. Three months after a city was overwhelmed, the Union's machinery has produced detailed figures on border guards under investigation, and three options on a paper about a framework.

Madrid is doing the actual work

The Spanish government, to its credit, has been doing the unglamorous part. In a statement on 20 October, La Moncloa said that more than 12,700 people had returned to Morocco between 10 August and 20 October. It said the big coastal camps had been cleared and that reception sites now offer more than 7,400 places. Those are organised returns. Most of the people who crossed in July went back to Morocco within hours, according to wire reports carried by Al Jazeera, but thousands, including unaccompanied minors, stayed for weeks in often dire conditions.

Madrid also turned down a demand from Ceuta's own city government to settle every expulsion and asylum case within a month. Those procedures, it said, "require an individual assessment". That is the law, and it is the reason a crisis of two days becomes a burden of years. As for the unaccompanied minors, who are the city's responsibility, the government notes that "none of them has, as of today, been reunited with their families in Morocco".

Decide who holds the brake

Europe does not need a fourth option. It needs to settle one principle: when a frontier city is overwhelmed, the state that owns the frontier pulls the emergency brake, quickly and lawfully, and the Union backs it with money, officers and return deals rather than consultations.

Spain had to declare a "Situation of National Security Interest" to get its own ministries working together. That is what a real emergency framework looks like. Brussels should copy it, approve it in weeks rather than seasons, and stop presenting each new framework as if it were an answer.