Tag Archives: Europe

Europe’s free travel will end unless Turkey halts flow of migrants, officials say

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Europe’s cherished free-travel zone will shut down unless Turkey acts to cut the number of migrants heading north through Greece by March 7, European Union officials said on Thursday.

Their declaration came as confrontations grow increasingly rancorous among European countries trying to cope with the influx of refugees. Those recriminations culminated in Greece’s recalling its ambassador to Austria on Thursday.

“In the next ten days, we need tangible and clear results on the ground,” the top EU migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said after EU justice and home affairs ministers met in Brussels on Thursday. “Otherwise there is a danger, there is a risk that the whole system will completely break down.”

EU leaders are now pinning their hopes on talks with Turkey on March 7 and their own migration summit on March 18-19. The two meetings look like their final chance to revive a flailing joint response to the crisis before warmer weather encourages more arrivals across the Mediterranean.

Seven European states have already restored border controls within the creaking Schengen passport-free zone. More said they would unilaterally tighten border controls unless a deal with Turkey shows results before the two March summits.

That deal promises Turkey $3.3 billion in aid to help it shelter refugees from the Syrian war, in return for preventing their traveling on to Europe.

“By March 7, we want a significant reduction in the number of refugees at the border between Turkey and Greece,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said. “Otherwise ,there will have to be other joint, coordinated European measures.”

Germany has been pushing the Turkey plan hard. Many other EU states are increasingly frustrated and skeptical, though. Another 110,000 people have arrived on the continent so far this year, mostly from Turkey via Greece, after more than a million arrived last year.

CRUCIAL DATE

“The 6th of March, the 7th of March is when you can expect the spring influx to rise. We have until that time to find solutions … ” said Klaas Dijkhoff, migration minister for the Netherlands, which now holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

“If that doesn’t lead to lower numbers, we’ll have to find other measures and we’ll have to do more contingency planning,” he said.

NATO has agreed to send ships to the Aegean to help fight people-trafficking, and one military official said the aim was to have the mission running before March 7.

The crisis was exacerbated when German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year waived EU procedures to take in hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Mutual recriminations have sabotaged efforts to share the burden systematically ever since.

“We have no policy any more. We are heading into anarchy,” said Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister.

Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have all introduced emergency border checks, allowed under the Schengen rules. But Austria, the last stop for most migrants before Germany, infuriated Brussels and Berlin last week by setting daily caps on the number of people it processes.

CASCADE OF CLOSURES

The decision set off a cascade of similar moves back through the western Balkans, the main migration route, leaving ever more migrants stuck in Greece.

“If Greece is not able or willing to secure the EU’s external border, others have to act,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said. “If Greece insists that it cannot protect the Greek border, one has to ask themselves whether the Schengen border should be there.”

Struggling to emerge from years of economic crisis, Greece accuses other EU states of forcing it to take a disproportionate share of the migrants. It not only has withdrawn its Austrian ambassador but threatened to block other EU decisions if its fellow members do not share the burden.

EU ministers agreed the EU’s executive arm will monitor the Western Balkans route and offer humanitarian assistance to Greece or elsewhere if bottlenecks grow. But Athens is raging.

“Many discuss how to handle a humanitarian crisis in Greece, which they themselves are trying to create,” said the country’s migration minister, Yannis Mouzalas. “Greece will not accept unilateral moves. Unilateral moves can also be made by Greece.”

(Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Alastair Macdonald, Tom Koerkemeier in Brussels, Michele Kambas and George Georgiopoulos in Athens; Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Larry King)

Austria sticks to migration cap despite EU legal warning

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Austria said on Thursday it would go ahead with introducing daily caps on migrants despite warnings from Brussels that the move broke European Union rules, which have already been badly stretched by the migration crisis engulfing the bloc.

Vienna announced it would let in no more than 3,200 people and cap asylum claims at 80 per day from Friday as it tries to cut immigration, drawing criticism from the European Union’s migration chief.

“Politically I say we’ll stick with it … it is unthinkable for Austria to take on the asylum seekers for the whole of Europe,” Austria’s Chancellor Werner Faymann said on arriving at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

Around 700,000 migrants entered Austria last year and about 90,000 applied for asylum in the country sitting on the migrant route from Turkey via Greece and the Balkans to Germany.

“After 100,000 refugees, we can’t tell the Austrian people that it will just continue like this. That’s why I tell the EU: we set a good example but to think that you don’t have to do anything, then I have to say it is time for the EU to act,” Faymann said.

Austria is the latest EU state to resort to its own measures to curb migration and try control the flows as the 28-nation bloc has all but failed to implement a joint response to its worst migration crisis in decades.

“It is true that Austria is under huge pressure,” European Union Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told Reuters earlier on Thursday. “It is true they are overwhelmed. But, on the other hand, there are some principles and laws that all countries must respect and apply.”

Avramopoulos sent a letter to Austria’s Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner on Thursday, urging Vienna to reconsider the move as it was against EU laws.

“The Austrians are obliged to accept asylum applications without putting a cap,” Avramopoulos said.

But Faymann blamed the failure of the European migration and refugee policies, saying the bloc’s relocation plan to ease the burden on most-affected countries was not working and criticizing central-eastern EU members who have stalled it.

The migration crisis, which saw more than a million people reach Europe last year, opened deep rifts between EU states, which are trading blame and increasingly resorting to ad-hoc national solutions despite Brussels calls to prevent them.

Faymann backed Merkel in pushing for more cooperation with Turkey to get Ankara to curb the number of migrants and refugees who embark from its shores toward Europe.

Germany and Austria are among 11 EU states that were due to meet Turkey separately before the summit of all 28 EU leaders to discuss taking in more people directly from Turkey to discourage perilous journeys across the Mediterranean.

“Every agreement between Turkey and Greece to protect the common border and make legal immigration possible, every advance and may it be ever so mediocre, would be necessary and right,” Faymann said, adding he would seek a new meeting with Turkey after the Thursday one was canceled over a bombing in Ankara.

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Europeans stack up $1.1 trillion in cash as economic worries grow

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The amount of cash across the euro zone rose to more than 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) last year, with almost 30 percent of it hoarded in 500 euro notes, ECB data has shown, as nervous individuals keep more of their money at home or in a vault.

Cash in circulation is almost double the amount of 10 years earlier and has risen steadily throughout the debt crisis, a trend that reflects fears about the euro zone and its banks as well as exasperation with low returns on savings.

Cash across the 19-country bloc climbed to 1.08 trillion euros at the end of last year, roughly 8 percent higher than at the start of 2015.

The supply of money has also increased over this time, partly due to quantitative easing or money printing, although by nothing like the same amount.

The rush for cash effectively reduces deposits at banks, thereby weakening them. As cash in circulation rose last year, deposits edged up at only a quarter of the pace.

The phenomenon is partly due to nervousness about the euro zone and its banks. Capital controls prohibit large withdrawals in Greece, where savers have hoarded tens of billions, after big depositors lost money in the country’s financial bailout.

One Cypriot central bank official told Reuters of a woman who had burnt cash in an oven after forgetting she had hidden it there. Other Cypriots stashed their lucre in washing machines and later sought to replace soggy notes at the central bank.

But the scale of the increase shows that hoarding is not limited to financially troubled countries.

“There are two issues: lack of trust in the banking system and concern about where to invest your money,” said Stavros Zenios, an academic and former member of the Board of Directors at Cyprus’s central bank.

The data comes amid a debate about scrapping the 500 euro note. The head of the European Anti-Fraud Office has suggested banning it because it is used by fraudsters. Benoit Coeure, an ECB policymaker, told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that the central bank was considering the future of its largest denomination.

Ditching the note, which could only be gradually phased out, may prompt savers to dissolve the more than 300 billion euros stored in 500-euro notes.

“It has a major impact on the economy,” said Zenios. “This hoarding is working against what the ECB is trying to do – get more liquidity into the system.”

(Additional reporting by Michele Kambas in Athens; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

NATO launches sea mission against migrant traffickers

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO ships are on their way to the Aegean Sea to help Turkey and Greece crack down on criminal networks smuggling refugees into Europe, the alliance’s top commander said on Thursday.

Hours after NATO defense ministers agreed to use their maritime force in the eastern Mediterranean to help combat traffickers, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove said he was working quickly to design the mission.

“We are sailing the ships in the appropriate direction,” Breedlove told a news conference, and the mission plan would be refined during the time they were en route. “That’s about 24 hours,” he said.

The plan, which was first raised only on Monday by Germany and Turkey, took NATO by surprise and is aimed at helping the continent tackle its worst migration crisis since World War Two. More than a million asylum-seekers arrived last year.

Unlike the EU’s maritime mission off the Italian coast, which brings rescued migrants to Europe’s shores, NATO will return migrants to Turkey even if they are picked up in Greek waters.

Britain’s defense minister said that marked a significant change in policy. “They won’t be taken to Greece and that’s a crucial difference,” Michael Fallon told reporters.

NATO will also monitor the Turkey-Syria land border for people-smugglers, said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Although the plan is still to be detailed by NATO generals, the allies are likely to use the ships to work with Turkish and Greek coastguards and the European Union border agency Frontex.

“There is now a criminal syndicate that is exploiting these poor people and this is an organized smuggling operation,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told reporters.

“Targeting that is the way that the greatest effect can be had … That is the principal intent of this,” Carter said.

The numbers of people fleeing war and failing states, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, show little sign of falling, despite winter weather that makes sea crossings even more perilous.

A 3 billion euro ($3.4 billion) deal between the EU and Turkey to stem the flows has yet to have a big impact.

SEEKING SHIPS

Germany said it would take part in the NATO mission along with Greece and Turkey, while the United States, NATO’s most powerful member, said it fully supported the plan.

The alliance’s so-called Standing NATO Maritime Group Two has five ships near Cyprus, led by Germany and with vessels from Canada, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Breedlove said NATO would need allies to contribute to sustain the mission over time.

Denmark is expected to offer a ship, according to a German government source. The Netherlands may also contribute.

“It is important that we now act quickly,” German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said.

Intelligence gathered about people-smugglers will be handed to Turkish coastguards to allow them to combat the traffickers more effectively, rather than having NATO act directly against the criminals, diplomats said.

Greek and Turkish ships will remain in their respective territorial waters, given sensitivities between the two countries.

NATO and the EU are eager to avoid the impression that the 28-nation military alliance is now tasked to stop refugees or treat them as a threat.

“This is not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats,” Stoltenberg said.

(Additional reporting by Sabine Siebold in Brussels and Michele Kambas in Athens,; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Greeks at frontline of migrant crisis angry at Europe’s criticism

ABOARD THE AGIOS EFSTRATIOS, Aegean Sea (Reuters) – Greek Captain Argyris Frangoulis lifts his binoculars and with eyes fixed on the Aegean Sea horizon, steers his patrol boat out near the Turkish border to a dinghy full of stranded refugees.

He zeroes in on the target and gasps – “My God!” – another grey rubber motor boat packed with about four times as many people as it can hold, many of them young children and babies.

“Everybody safe, OK?” he yells at the passengers, mainly Syrians and Afghans, approaching the coast guard vessel bewildered and in near-silence. “Stay calm and do not panic!”

About 50 people are pulled aboard one by one, smiling but too exhausted to speak. By the time they stagger wearily to the boat’s rear, a dinghy is spotted in the distance. Then another, and another, crammed almost entirely with women and children.

By midday, the Agios Efstratios, a gunboat with 29-member crew who work in shifts, had plucked more than 600 people from sea and ferried them to the port of Lesbos, the island on the frontline of Europe’s migration crisis.

From Greece’s islands, the refugees and migrants travel to the mainland and then to the northern border with non-European Union member Macedonia. Most of them are trying to reach Germany.

The influx has led some in the EU to accuse Greece of failing to make use of available EU funds and personnel to ensure people arriving in the Schengen zone of open border travel are documented. Some EU members have suggested Greece should be suspended from Schengen if it does not improve.

But the criticism and threats have been met with anger in Greece. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Wednesday said the EU was “confused and bewildered” by the migrant crisis and said the bloc should take responsibility like Greece has done, despite being crash-strapped.

Most Greeks, including the coast guard, the army, the police were “setting an example of humanity to the world,” Tsipras said.

For those at the frontline, foreign criticism is even more painful.

“We’re giving 150 percent,” said Lieutenant Commander Antonis Sofiadelis, head of coast guard operations on Lesbos.

Once a dinghy enters Greek territorial waters, the coast guard is obliged to rescue it and transport its passengers to the port.

“The sea is not like land. You’re dealing with a boat with 60 people in constant danger. It could sink, they could go overboard,” he said.

RELIEF AFTER EVERY RESCUE

More than a million people, many fleeing war-ravaged countries and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, reached Europe in the past year, most of them arriving in Greece.

For the crews plying a 250-km-long coastline between Lesbos and Turkey, the numbers attempting the crossing are simply too big to handle. It is but a fraction of a coastline thousands of kilometers long between Greece and Turkish shores.

“The flow is unreal,” Sofiadelis said.

Lesbos has long been a stopover for refugees. Locals recall when people fleeing the Iraqi-Kurdish civil war in the mid-1990s swam across from Turkey.

Yet those numbers do not compare to what has become Europe’s biggest migration crisis since World War Two and which has continued unabated despite the winter making the Aegean Sea even more treacherous.

After days of gale force winds and freezing temperatures, more than 2,400 people arrived on Greece’s outlying islands on Monday, nearly double the daily average for February, according to United Nations data.

Sofiadelis, the Lesbos commander, said controls should be stepped up on the Turkish side, while Europe should provide assistance with more boats, more staff and better monitoring systems such as radars and night-vision cameras.

Greek boats, assisted by EU border control agency Frontex, already scan the waters night and day.

By late morning on Monday, Captain Frangoulis and his crew – including a seafaring dog picked up at a port years ago – have been at sea for more than 24 hours.

Each time his crew spot a boat that could be carrying migrants “our stomach is tied up in knots,” Frangoulis said. “There’s this fear that everything must go well, everyone boards safely, no child falls in the sea, no one’s injured.”

Though fewer than 10 nautical miles separate Lesbos from Turkish shores, hundreds of people have drowned trying to make it across.

Patrol boats, as well as local fishermen, have often fished out corpses from the many shipwrecks of the past months, the bodies blackened and bruised from days at sea.

After every rescue operation, a sense of relief fills the crews. Once the Agios Efstratios docked at the Lesbos harbor on Monday, Frangoulis’ beaming crew helped passengers disembark, holding up crying babies in their arms.

“There’s no room for sentimentalism. We execute commands,” Frangoulis said of the rescue operations.

“Beyond commands, we’re human. We’ll lose heart, we’ll cry, we’ll feel sad if something doesn’t go well. There isn’t a person who won’t be moved by this,” he said.

(Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Founding members say European Union is in bad shape

ROME (Reuters) – The European Union faces “critical times” and all its members should set aside selfish interests to tackle problems such as immigration and terrorism, the bloc’s six founding nations said on Tuesday.

A week after the EU accepted that some members may never go further in sharing sovereignty, as part of the price for keeping Britain in the club, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg pledged to pursue “ever closer union” at a meeting in Rome, where they founded the bloc in 1957.

“We are concerned about the state of the European project,” the foreign ministers of the Six said in a statement after their talks. “Indeed, it appears to be facing very challenging times. It is in these critical times that we, as founding members, feel particularly called upon.”

The meeting was held against the backdrop of deep division in the 28-nation bloc over how to handle the flows of hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe fleeing war and failing states in the Middle East and North Africa.

It also came a week after Brussels agreed a draft deal with Britain Prime Minister David Cameron that, among other things, reaffirmed the limitations of a treaty commitment to pursue the “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe, part of a package to help Cameron campaign before a referendum that the EU’s second biggest economy should continue its 43-year membership.

While acknowledging that the Union “allows for different paths of integration”, the original signatories of the Treaty of Rome declared: “We remain resolved to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe.”

Meeting in Italy, which has been in the frontline of a wave of migration to Europe across the Mediterranean, the ministers also stressed the need to overcome divisions on the EU response.

Hungary and Austria this week called for fences on the Macedonian and Bulgarian borders with Greece and between Austria and Slovenia, and several states have called into question the Schengen accord on free circulation inside the EU.

The statement called for better management of the Union’s external borders in order to make them more secure while preserving Schengen and not hampering freedom of movement.

It contained no concrete policy proposals, but said Europe “is successful when we overcome narrow self-interest in the spirit of solidarity”.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer Writing by Gavin Jones; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and James Dalgleish)

Mediterranean deaths soar as people-smugglers get crueler

GENEVA (Reuters) – More people died crossing the eastern Mediterranean in January than in the first eight months of last year, the International Organization for Migration said on Friday, blaming increased ruthlessness by people-traffickers.

As of Jan. 28, 218 had died in the Aegean Sea – a tally not reached on the Greek route until mid-September in 2015. Another 26 died in the central Mediterranean trying to reach Italy. Smugglers were using smaller, less seaworthy boats, and packing them with even more people than before, the IOM said.

IOM spokesman Joel Millman said the more reckless methods might be due to “panic in the market that this is not going to last much longer” as traffickers fear European governments may find ways to stem the unprecedented flow of migrants and refugees.

There also appeared to be new gangs controlling the trafficking trade in North Africa, he said.

“There was a very pronounced period at the end of the year when boats were not leaving Libya and we heard from our sources in North Africa that it was because of inter-tribal or inter-gang fighting for control of the market,” Millman said.

“And now that it’s picking up again and it seems to be more lethal, we wonder: what is the character of these groups that have taken over the trade?”

The switch to smaller, more packed boats had also happened on the route from Turkey to Greece, the IOM said, but was unable to explain why.

The increase in deaths in January was not due to more traffic overall. The number of arrivals in Greece and Italy was the lowest for any month since June 2015, with a total of 55,528 people landing there between Jan. 1 and Jan. 28, the IOM said.

Last year a record 1 million people made the Mediterranean Sea crossing, five times more than in 2014. During the year, the IOM estimates that 805 died in the eastern Mediterranean and 2,892 died in the central Mediterranean.

In the past few months the proportion of children among those making the journey has risen from about a quarter to more than a third, and Millman said children often made up more than half of the occupants of the boats.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Dutch suggest EU return migrants to Turkey as more arrive without case for asylum

BRUSSELS/THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The Netherlands floated an idea on Thursday to ferry migrants reaching Greece straight back to Turkey to stop a relentless influx into the European Union as EU officials cited a rise in the numbers of those who would not qualify for asylum.

The 28-nation bloc has all but failed to curb or control the influx of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, more than one million of whom arrived in Europe last year, mainly via Greece and heading towards the EU’s biggest economy, Germany.

More than 54,500 people have already reached Europe by sea this year, including 50,668 through Greece, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

They keep flowing in despite stormy winter weather making the journey ever more perilous, a fact highlighted by a UNHCR report that 235 migrants were dead or missing already in 2016. On Thursday, 24 drowned when their boat sank off a Greek island close to the Turkish coast.

Much of the EU debate on how to handle the influx has focused on distinguishing people fleeing war, and thus eligible for international protection, from “economic” migrants seeking better lives without being under immediate threat.

“Indeed we have seen that the numbers of people arriving in Europe who don’t have a genuine claim to asylum have been rising slightly,” a spokeswoman for the European Commission told a regular news briefing on Thursday.

EU nations have grown unnerved by the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War Two, one that has jeopardised the bloc’s Schengen zone of passport-free travel over national borders that has contributed greatly to its vaunted prosperity.

In the latest idea for discouraging migrants from flooding into Europe, the head of a party in the Dutch ruling coalition said it was drafting a plan under which those arriving in Greece by sea could be dispatched straight back to Turkey.

Diederik Samsom said European countries would have to agree in exchange to take several hundred thousand refugees each year out of nearly 2 million currently in Turkey. The Netherlands now holds the EU’s rotating presidency and Samsom said it would seek to push for Europe-wide agreement on the plan.

Samsom also said improving conditions for Syrian refugees in Turkey meant it could soon be regarded as a safe country to which asylum-seekers could be returned.

Amnesty International quickly denounced the idea as “fundamentally flawed”, saying it would deny those arriving the right to have their asylum claims properly considered.

“Any resettlement proposal that is conditional on effectively sealing off borders and illegally pushing back tens of thousands of people while denying them access to asylum procedures is morally bankrupt,” said Amnesty’s John Dalhuisen.

“There is no excuse for breaking the law and flouting international obligations in the process.”

GERMANY, SWEDEN, DENMARK

The government of Germany, where more than a million migrants arrived last year alone, on Thursday agreed tighter asylum rules, while Sweden and Finland said they would deport tens of thousands of last year’s asylum seekers.

In another example of how wealthy European states are seeking to deter migrants, Denmark’s parliament on Tuesday passed measures allowing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ valuables to pay for their stay, despite protests from international human rights organisations.

The European Commission said on Thursday it was looking into whether Denmark’s move was undermining fundamental EU values.

While the overall number of arrivals is relatively low compared to the EU’s 500 million population, the uneven distribution among member states has put heavy pressure on public and security services in some, as well as fuelled support for anti-foreigner nationalists and populists across the bloc.

The EU border agency Frontex said on Thursday the number of Syrians arriving on Greek islands had declined in recent months, while Iraqi arrivals had risen.

“The percentage of declared Syrians among all of the migrants landing on the Greek islands has fallen considerably in the last several months,” Frontex said, adding that some 39 percent of those arriving in Greece in December were Syrians, compared to 43 percent in November and 51 percent in October.

The shifting numbers partly reflect how registration and identification of migrants has improved in Greece over the last quarter, meaning fewer people pass under false nationality.

Syrian nationality has been a common answer to the question of origin as people fleeing the devastating civil war in the Middle East country are seen as standing the greatest chance of successful asylum applications in the EU.

(Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

EU warns Greece to fix border ‘neglect’

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The EU executive concluded on Wednesday that Greece could face more border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix “serious deficiencies” in its management of the area’s external frontier.

EU countries have been increasingly critical of Athens’ handling of the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War Two, with more than a million migrants reaching Europe last year, mainly through Greece.

“If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to … allow member states to temporarily close their borders,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news briefing.

He was speaking after the executive accepted a report saying cash-strapped Athens had “seriously neglected” its obligations to fellow Schengen states.

The use of that phrase could pave the way for EU governments to exercise the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years once short-term measures currently in place expire in May.

Several EU member states have instituted emergency controls on their borders and warned they may effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free zone. Most of the irregular migrants arriving in the EU have come from Turkey via Greece and trekked northward to Germany.

Dombrovskis said Greece was not identifying or registering people arriving effectively, not uploading fingerprinting data to relevant bases systematically, and not checking travel documents properly and against key databases.

EU border agency Frontex says its latest mission to the Greek island of Lesbos in January showed improvements in registration procedures.

But EU officials carried out an assessment in Greece in November that lead to Wednesday’s conclusion that there were “serious deficiencies” in Greek frontier control.

SEALING GREECE OFF

The step of imposing border controls, under the as yet unused Article 26 of the Schengen code, can be taken for up to six months and can be renewed up to three times for a total of two years.

Dombrovskis said the Commission was intent on preserving Schengen, one of the EU’s key achievements, and said Greece had improved its border controls since November – but not enough.

The next step in the process would be for Schengen member states – 26 countries, most of which are also in the EU – to confirm the Commission’s conclusions in a majority vote. The executive would then recommend remedial measures and assess by May whether Athens had complied.

Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so installing new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports.

Diplomats and officials described the move to penalize tourism-dependent Greece as a way to raise pressure on Athens, which is already mired in a financial crisis, to better implement EU measures intended to identify and register all those arriving from Turkey.

The EU is also looking into using Frontex more to help guard the border between Greece and Macedonia, which is not a member of the EU or Schengen. Some Frontex personnel are already at Greece’s northern border, but the agency’s mandate does not allow for interventions in third countries.

Some diplomats said countries could send more police or border guards to Macedonia on the basis of bilateral agreements.

Frontex has a precedent from 2006, when it ran a naval mission in territorial waters off Senegal and Mauritania to prevent African migrants reaching Spain’s Canary Islands. That operation was carried out on the basis of bilateral agreements between Spain, Dakar and Nouakchott.

“Details would need to be worked out but there seems to be very little opposition to this idea, apart, of course, from Greece,” said one EU diplomat involved.

Athens says the influx is impossible to control and its migration minister, Yannis Mouzalas, warned this week that sealing his country off from Schengen would create a humanitarian crisis with thousands of people trapped in Greece.

(Editing by Hugh Lawson)

‘Running out of time’, EU puts Greece, passport-free region on notice

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The European Union edged closer on Monday to accepting that its Schengen open-borders area may be suspended for up to two years if it fails in the next few weeks to curb the influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

After chairing a meeting of EU counterparts in Amsterdam, the Dutch migration minister said they expected an unprecedented prolongation of the time governments can impose border checks because the migrant crisis would not be under control before current, short-term dispensations expire in May.

Some ministers made clear such a — theoretically temporary — move would cut off Greece, where more than 40,000 people have already arrived by sea from Turkey this year despite a deal with Ankara two months ago to hold back an exodus of Syrian refugees. More than 60 have drowned on the crossing since Jan. 1 alone.

Greek officials noted that closing routes northward, even if physically possible, would not solve the problem. But electoral pressure on governments, including in the EU’s leading power Germany, to stem the flow and resist efforts to spread asylum seekers across the bloc are making free travel rules untenable.

“We are running out of time,” said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos as he urged states to implement agreed measures for reducing and controlling movements of migrants across the continent — or else face the collapse of the 30-year-old Schengen zone, a major EU achievement.

But Dutch minister Klaas Dijkhoff said time has effectively already run out to preserve all of the passport-free regime that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to trek from Greece and Italy to Germany and Sweden over the past year.

“The ‘or else’ is already happening,” he said. “A year ago, we all warned that if we don’t come up with a solution, then Schengen will be under pressure. It already is.”

The piecemeal reintroduction of controls by several governments under pressure from domestic opinion at national borders with fellow EU states should be better coordinated, said Dijkhoff, whose government last year floated the idea of a “mini-Schengen” that critics saw as a way for Germany and its northern neighbors to bar the influx from the Mediterranean.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opened her country’s borders to Syrians fleeing civil war last summer, is under mounting pressure to halt the inflow after more than a million migrants entered Germany last year.

Without a clear drop in the numbers arriving before she meets fellow EU leaders at a summit in mid-February, some form of border closer by the bloc’s leading power, which would have a knock-on effect across Europe, would be increasingly likely — not least as Germans vote in key regional elections in March.

The Commission, the EU executive, is already conducting a review of whether Greece’s difficulty in processing constitute “persistent serious deficiencies” on the external EU frontier that would justify a historic move to allow states to reimpose controls on those arriving from Greece.

It is due to make recommendations next month and Athens would have three months to respond. Existing measures taken by some states under a different rule expire in mid-May. Minister Dijkhoff made clear that few expect the situation to be under control by then, so the longer-term suspension should be ready.

Under that measure, Article 26 of the Schengen code, states could reimpose controls on documents for six months, renewable three times, until May 2018. EU officials acknowledged, however, that no one knows what would happen after that if governments were not prepared to return to the status quo before last year.

“Everyone understands that the Schengen zone is on the brink,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said.

“If we cannot protect the external EU border, the Greek-Turkish border, then the Schengen external border will move towards central Europe … Greece must increase its resources as soon as possible and accept help.”

The Schengen zone comprises 26 states, most of which are also EU members. Germany, France, Austria and Sweden are among several countries that have introduced temporary border checks as they struggle to control the flow of people.

“Speaking about timetables, it’s already too late. We have seven countries with border controls,” Sweden’s interior minister Anders Ygeman told Reuters.

He said migrant registration centers need to start functioning in Greece and Italy as planned: “In the end, if a country doesn’t live up to its obligations, we will have to restrict its connections to the Schengen area.”

Appearing anxious to calm a confrontation with the radical leftist government in Athens that already clashed with Berlin last year over its demands of bailout loans to keep Greece in the euro zone, his German counterpart was more reserved.

“Blaming people in public doesn’t help,” Thomas de Maiziere said.

The EU has taken various steps to give cash-strapped Athens financial assistance to deal with the crisis, but many member states believe Athens is not using that enough. Of five registration “hotspot” centers due to be set up for migrants arriving in Greece, only one is running so far.

(Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Richard Balmforth)