Tag Archives: migrant camps

EU tries to assuage German, Italian concerns on migration

A migrant, part of a group intercepted aboard three dinghies off the coast in the Mediterranean Sea, leaves a rescue boat upon arrival at the port of Malaga, Spain June 18, 2018. REUTERS/Jon Nazca

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union leaders will try to reassure Germany and Italy over migration at a summit next week as a stand-off in Berlin threatens Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition.

The union could take steps to stop asylum seekers moving on from the country in which they are registered and start deciding asylum requests at centers to be established beyond EU borders in the future, according to a draft summit statement.

The proposed steps come ahead of the June 28-29 summit in Brussels at which EU leaders will attempt to agree on a joint migration policy three years after more than 1 million people arrived in Europe, causing a crisis for the union.

Their joint draft statement is not public and its wording might change. But it showed the bloc is trying to accommodate a new, anti-establishment government in Italy, as well as Berlin where Merkel’s coalition partner issued an ultimatum for an EU-wide deal on migration.

If the summit fails to reach a satisfactory outcome, Berlin would issue a unilateral ban on refugees already registered in other EU states from entering the country, said the junior governing Christian Social Union that has the interior ministry.

German police data suggest any such ban could only affect several hundred people a month and hence would have no big impact on the overall number of refugees in Germany.

The EU border agency Frontex said more than 90 percent of current arrivals in Italy, Greece and Spain register for asylum there. Many still often go north, including to Germany. This “secondary movement” violates EU law but has been widespread.

“Member States should take all necessary internal legislative … to counter such movements,” the text said in an indirect response to German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.

The proposal came as the CSU faces a tough regional vote in Bavaria in October. At its home base, the party faces growing popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has advocated harsh anti-immigration policies.

The AfD on Tuesday accused the CSU of copying its ideas on how to deal with the migrant crisis.

IMMIGRATION LOW, TENSIONS HIGH

The EU has long been bitterly divided over migration.

The bloc has struggled to reform its internal asylum rules, which broke down in 2015, and has instead tried to tighten its borders and prevent new arrivals. The EU has given aid and money to Turkey, Jordan, Libya, Niger and other countries.

Next week, EU leaders will also agree to look into opening “disembarkation platforms” in regions such as north Africa to decide asylum requests before people get to Europe.

European capitals from Rome to Budapest have long called for such centres but concerns that processing people outside EU borders could violate the law have stalled progress.

“Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys,” the draft statement of EU leaders said.

Italy’s government closed its ports to rescue ships and said it prefers to have Frontex working in Africa to prevent people from coming rather than patrol the Mediterranean.

The Libyan government already runs migrant camps where the EU pays the U.N. migration and refugee agencies to help resettle people to Europe legally or return them home further south in Africa, rather than have them try to reach Europe.

Despite pressure from Berlin and Rome, reform of the bloc’s internal asylum rules is stuck. Southern and wealthy central states demand that all EU members host some new arrivals but eastern states refuse leading to a stalemate.

In evidence of that division, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Tuesday that the CSU demand for border checks within the EU is unacceptable. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said separately on Tuesday it would be “very difficult to reach a solution” next week.

Otherwise, there is agreement on strengthening external borders and bringing together the border protection databases.

“So much progress has been made, we can’t let all slip away now. So we need to give key countries something to keep them on board,” one EU official said of the proposed text.

(Additional reporting by Alexander Ratz and Michelle Martin in Berlin, Steve Scherer in Rome, Robert Muller in Prague and Johan Sennero, Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)

Greece vows to improve conditions in overcrowded migrant camps

Refugees and migrants line up for food distribution at the Moria migrant camp

By Angeliki Koutantou

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece, a frontline country for migrants fleeing to Europe from war and poverty, vowed on Wednesday to improve living conditions in its overcrowded island camps.

The number making the sea crossing from Turkey to Greece has fallen sharply this year under a European Union deal with Turkey. It stipulates that people arriving after March 20 are to be held on five Aegean islands and sent back if their asylum applications are not accepted.

According to figures from U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, 173,208 people have reached Greece this year, down from 856,723 in 2015.

Some 60,000 migrants, mostly Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, are still scattered across the country, which is struggling to emerge from a debt crisis.

About 15,000 are in overcrowded island camps that have grown violent as the slow processing of asylum requests adds to frustration over living conditions.

“We are planning to have new, small venues on the islands, either by setting up small, two-storey houses, in order to empty the tents, or by finding other places … to improve conditions,” Greek Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told reporters.

“It will need time but we will do it.”

He said authorities would also set up small detention centres and boost policing.

Mouzalas acknowledged that slow processing of asylum requests was an “Achilles heel” but said Athens was hiring more staff to speed it up.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)

Police swoop on Paris migrant camp after Calais Jungle clearout

Migrants stand near their tents at a makeshift migrant camp on a street near the metro stations of Jaures and Stalingrad in Paris.

By Johnny Cotton and Emmanuel Jarry

PARIS (Reuters) – French riot police swooped on an illegal migrant camp in northeastern Paris just after dawn on Monday, sparking a brief standoff at a site where numbers have soared since the closure of the Jungle camp in the northern port city of Calais.

The operation, largely consisting of identity checks on some of an estimated 2,500 migrants sleeping rough around a canal and urban train bridge near Paris’s Stalingrad metro station, came as pressure mounts on the government to clear and shut the camp.

Tension has risen in tandem with speculation that police will move in to evacuate and close the camp definitively in the coming days, as the Paris authorities are demanding.

A Reuters journalist at the scene said a digger moved in to clear a small part of the camp, a tentacular sprawl of tents, mattresses, blankets and the meager belongings of migrants who come in large part from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan.

Migrants shouted at police in riot gear as the digger swept debris and rubbish away in a small section of the camp, which was otherwise left largely intact. One policeman sprayed a migrant with tear gas.

After a couple of hours, police allowed migrants to move back in after a tidy-up by municipal cleaning workers.

In a letter sent to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo requested that the camp be shut rapidly on humanitarian and sanitary grounds.

City Hall officials say the numbers living and sleeping rough in the area have swollen by about a third since the evacuation last week of the Jungle camp in Calais, where more than 6,000 people were living, most of them in the hope of making it across the short Channel sea crossing to Britain.

The Calais camp, a vast shanty town on sandy scrubland where demolition workers were due to finish their destruction job by the end of Monday, came to symbolize Europe’s fraught efforts to cope with a record influx of migrants fleeing strife and poverty in countries from Afghanistan to Sudan.

French President Francois Hollande urged Britain at the weekend to shoulder its part of the responsibility for 1,500 minors who have been housed temporarily in container boxes in Calais following the clearout. The rest of the 6,000-plus inhabitants of the Jungle have been dispatched to lodgings across France, pending examination of their asylum cases.

“It’s up to Britain now to fully live up to its duty, that’s not finished yet,” said Pascal Brice, the head of France’s refugee agency, Ofpra.

(Writing by Brian Love; editing by Mark Heinrich)