The leaders of France and Italy have called for tighter border controls in the European Union’s Schengen area.

Speaking after a summit in Rome today (26 April), Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, said that the arrival of some 30,000 migrants from north Africa over the past few months might undermine citizens’ confidence in the Schengen agreement unless the agreement is revised.

Italy angered France when it began issuing temporary residency papers to thousands of Tunisians who have arrived in Italy since January. Many of the Tunisians are seeking to join friends or family in France, while France is determined to keep them out. The French authorities do not recognise the validity of the Italian permits.

“We want Schengen to work, and to make sure that it works it has to be reformed,” Sarkozy said at a joint news conference. “We wanted a single European currency so we reformed the system. We have to do the same with Schengen.”

“We need to reform Schengen because we believe in Schengen,” Sarkozy said.

Among the proposed changes are new rules that would make it easier to temporarily re-establish border controls between two countries.

The two leaders today wrote to Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, to demand that ongoing work on revising the Schengen rules be accelerated. They said that a summit of EU leaders in June should lay the political groundwork for a far-reaching revision of the Schengen agreement.

The European Commission is scheduled to present its plans for amending the Schengen rules next week (4 May).

The leaders also called for the creation of an EU-wide asylum system and for the adoption, by June, of new rules for Frontex, the EU’s border management agency.

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