European Union states must follow through with refugee relocation program – expert opinion

Nov. 20, 2015 - PRLog -- The countries of the European Union must distribute the planned 160,000 refugees from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea, overcome mutual misunderstandings and develop a joint program to solve the prolonged crisis, writes Angeliki Dimitriadi, research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) that focuses on illegal migration, in her article titled “Burden sharing, where art thou?” published in the foreign media.

She reminds that the first 30 participants of the relocation program in Greece, including four families from Syria and two from Iraq, have departed from Athens to Luxembourg in early November 2015.

“To mark the occasion, a ceremony preceded their departure and was attended by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos, President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn and Greece’s Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Yiannis Mouzalas,” the analyst points out.

At the same time, she notes that the European Union has failed to achieve anything significant in this issue so far. In particular, the EU countries only accepted fewer than 200 migrants and made available less than 1,500 places for refugees out of the planned 160,000. Moreover, they did not provide the required numbers of migration experts and border guards to deal with the issue.

She also stresses the fact that the projected network of “hotspots” – screening, distribution and temporary residence centers for asylum seekers – currently fails to deliver, as Greece and Italy, the two countries that receive thousands of migrants from African and the Middle East, only opened one such institution each by early November 2015.

“Italy has publicly acknowledged that it is waiting to see how quickly EU members will mobilize, and how quickly relocation will take place before it sets up more centers. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has said as early as in September that though Italy is ready for the hotspots, it is up to Europe to redistribute the migrants,” the expert writes.

In the meantime, according to her, Athens suffers from a dire lack of resources, with any real assistance from Europe nonexistent, and has to work behind the schedule – the facts highlighted by the Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann during his visit to the newly-opened Lesbos migrant screening center in October 2015.

“He warned that more of them would not be ready in time since ‘in terms of timing and organization, nothing has been thought through. [To be ready] by the end of the year requires central coordination, considerably more resources, considerably more personnel’,” Angeliki Dimitriadi quotes the politician.

Full text news agency "PenzaNews":http://penzanews.ru/en/opinion/60052-2015