Tag Archives: Migrant Crisis

Greece seeks to stem flow of migrants as thousands trapped by border limits

ATHENS/IDOMENI (Reuters) – Greece moved to slow the flow of migrants from its islands to the mainland on Friday as thousands of homeless refugees were trapped in the country by border limits imposed along a Balkan route to richer nations in northern Europe.

From its northern frontier with Macedonia to its port of Piraeus in the south, Greece was inundated with refugees and migrants after border shutdowns cascaded through the Balkans, stranding at least 20,000 in the country.

At Idomeni, a small community on the border with Macedonia, Reuters witnesses saw hundreds of families walking towards the frontier to join an estimated 3,000 more at a makeshift camp where many pitched tents in a field close to razor wire fence.

More than 500 km further south, hundreds of people were temporarily accommodated at a disused airport west of Athens. Sleeping mats were strewn across the terminal among biscuit wrappers as many women sat on the floor, some weeping.

“Planes bombed our homes, it was dangerous to stay there,” said mother of three Rajiya Zara, 38, nine months pregnant. “I’m afraid for my children.”

Between 300 and 400 people refused to stay at the airport, and took off on their own. “Help Us,” a large piece of paper held by one said. “We are human, open the borders”, read another, scrawled on a sleeping mat.

WE DIDN’T START IT

Athens on Thursday recalled its ambassador to Austria in anger over the border closures and has threatened to block European Union decision-making unless the bloc comes up with concerted action to deal with the crisis.

In the latest measure to slow the northward movement of migrants, the police chiefs of Slovenia, Austria, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia agreed to limit the flow to about 580 per day per country, Slovenian police said on Friday.

The police chiefs are “obliged to limit daily transit through Western Balkans countries to a number which would enable a control of every migrant according to Schengen rules,” the police said.

Austria had earlier in the week hosted a summit of Balkan nations on how to regulate the migrant flows, but did not invite Athens. “Greece is being attacked by short-sighted countries, as if we were bombing Syria or created the refugee flows,” said Nikos Kotzias, Greece’s foreign minister.

Greece asked its passenger ferry companies and travel agencies on Friday to cut back on bringing migrants and refugees from frontline islands to the mainland and said its own chartered ships would stay put for a few days.

The moves, described by Greece’s shipping minister as temporary, are designed to stem a flow of people mostly fleeing violence in the Middle East.

Most refugees arrive in the European Union after a short but at times dangerous journey by small boats from Turkey to nearby Greek islands such as Lesbos.

“We have taken some actions because of border closings, including an increase of temporary shelter spaces and a relative slowdown of the transport of migrants from the islands to the port of Piraeus,” Shipping Minister Thodoris Dritsas told Skai TV.

He said three ships chartered specifically to move migrants to the Greek mainland would be docked at the islands and accommodate refugees for “two or three days”.

“It is a small scale slowdown (of flows to the mainland),” he said.

Macedonia, to the immediate north, is accepting only Iraqis and Syrians, witnesses say, with Afghans being turned back. Many of those who travelled the 550 km journey north only to be turned away sat in the stinking and overcrowded airport terminal on Friday, pondering their fate.

“I want to go to Germany,” said 18-year-old Nadershah Ahmedi, a student from Afghanistan. “When we came to Greece we heard the borders to Macedonia are closed for Afghans. Why can Syrians and Iraqis pass but not us?”

(Additional reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos, Angeliki Koutantou, and Alkis Konstantinidis, and Marja Novak in Ljubljana; writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Dominic Evans)

Trapped between Iraq frontlines, refugees illustrate their predicament

ERBIL (Reuters) – They are trapped between two worlds – one they want to leave and the other to which they are denied entry.

For three months, more than 500 men, women and children have been living in no-man’s land in northern Iraq, caught in the crossfire between Kurdish forces and Islamic State.

Their dilemma illustrates the wider predicament in which Sunni Arabs find themselves in the new order emerging from the conflict, which has displaced millions and is redrawing internal boundaries in both Iraq and Syria.

Stranded between frontlines in the Sinjar area, the group of Sunni Arabs wants to leave Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, but is being denied passage by the Kurds, who have staked out their territory in the north and fear infiltration.

In telephone interviews with Reuters, three men from the same village, including an elder, explained that if they turned back Islamic State would kill them for trying to escape.

With nowhere to go, the group has settled around 500 meters from Kurdish positions, living in tents made out of empty sacks and taking cover in makeshift trenches when Islamic State fires mortars at the peshmerga.

“The mortars are better than hunger,” said 48-year old farmer Mahmoud. “You can hide from mortars, but the hunger won’t go away.”

Cold, malnutrition and lack of medical care claimed the lives of a child and an elderly woman in the winter months, and two men were killed when they stepped on a mine, the three villagers said. Another infant died during childbirth last week, according to several members of the group.

Some are suffering from skin conditions because they are not able to wash, and the water they drink from wells in the no-man’s land is dirty, so they lay out containers to collect rain when it falls.

For the first two months food was smuggled to them from inside Islamic State territory, but the militants have now mined the route. They now depend on the goodwill of Arab tribes living on the Kurdish side of the frontline who recently bought them basic supplies the peshmerga allow through. They supplement that with edible plants that grow around them.

The peshmerga occasionally give bread from their own provisions to the displaced children when they are hungry and wander up to the berm, but say they cannot let anyone through the front line unless they receive orders from above.

Their commander, Fareeq Jamal, said it was not his decision who was excluded, but “anyone who is present in the area where terrorists are present is under suspicion”.

The Kurds have managed to keep their autonomous region relatively safe from Islamic State, but the militants have carried out several bombings in the region’s capital since 2014 and security services say they have thwarted other plots.

At a briefing in Geneva last week, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Kurdish authorities to ensure the group’s safety and access to basic humanitarian aid.

“If the Kurdish authorities have security concerns about this particular group, they should vet people on an individual basis in a safe location, in full transparency and in accordance with the law,” said Rupert Colville.

“If any wrongdoing is found to have taken place, those responsible should be charged and tried according to the law. Where it is found that an individual has not committed any crime and there are no legitimate security concerns which warrant his or her continued detention under the law, then he or she should be immediately released.”

The Kurdish region has taken in around half of the 3.3 million Iraqis who have been internally displaced over the past two years, putting huge strain on its resources. The number will only increase as Kurdish forces take on Islamic State in their remaining strongholds.

The group of villagers has been stranded since Kurdish forces routed Islamic State from the Sinjar area last November and they fled their village of Golat.

Even if they could return there, the displaced Arabs say they are too afraid of being attacked by local Yazidis who accuse them of complicity in the atrocities perpetrated against their community by Islamic State.

The Yazidi minority was hounded by Islamic State militants who consider them devil-worshippers and killed and captured thousands as they overran the Sinjar area in the summer of 2014.

“You know what Daesh did to them,” said Mahmoud. “As far as they’re concerned, any (Sunni) Arab is either Daesh or related to Daesh.”

Jabbar Yawar, the secretary general of the peshmerga ministry, said the entire village had sided with Islamic State, and there might be a backlash from Yazidis.

The displaced Arabs insist only one person from their village joined Islamic State and say he is now in Mosul. “If there were a Daesh (member) amongst us we would execute him ourselves,” said Mahmoud. “Each one of us would put a bullet through his head”.

(editing by Janet McBride)

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)

Where the dead don’t count in Europe’s migration crisis

CATANIA, Italy (Reuters) – Lucky Iz had just turned 15 when he and his friend Godfrey set off to cross the Sahara on a hot August afternoon in 2012. Lucky has still not told Godfrey’s family what happened on the journey towards Europe. This is his account.

The Nigerian boys arrived at the edge of the Sahara with water, biscuits, milk and energy drinks, just as the people-smuggler had instructed them, Lucky recalled. They climbed with 36 others onto the back of a Toyota pickup truck that sped away from Agadez, a city in northern Niger.

Lucky sat atop a pile of supplies, hanging onto a post with his feet dangling over the side. He knew the driver would not stop if anyone fell off. He was parched and hungry. The sand that sprayed up from under the truck’s tires stung his eyes. For three days they drove, stopping occasionally to refuel and drink their water.

On the fourth day, the driver lost his way. His compass had stopped working. Some in the group would never make it out of the desert.

International groups track numbers of migrants who drown crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. Last year an estimated 3,800 people died that way.

But no one counts the dead of the Sahara. This makes it easier for politicians to ignore the lives lost there, humanitarian workers say.

The United Nations refugee agency has no data on how many people die in the desert, according to its North Africa unit. The International Committee of the Red Cross reconnects families, but does not collect information about their dead. A handful of unofficial databases maintained by volunteers, academics and non-governmental organizations have tried to keep count, but they depend largely on media reports, and their funding is sporadic.

“We don’t have any data,” said Julien Brachet, a fellow at Oxford’s International Migration Institute who has been doing field work in the Sahara, including northern Niger, for more than a decade.

“It’s a problem, because there may be as many people dying in the desert as there are in the Mediterranean,” he said. “We can’t prove it, so we can’t say it, so nobody is going to intervene.”

LOST

Agadez has long been a gateway to the desert. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 120,000 migrants passed through the city on their way to North Africa or Europe in 2015, more than twice as many as the previous year. In the past, people would leave the city openly. Weekly military convoys offered some protection.

But since a tragedy in 2013, when 92 desert travelers died of thirst, the government has moved to shut down the routes, and the traffic has become more secretive and hidden.

Lost in the sands, the driver of Lucky’s truck kept going for five more days, hoping to reach a landmark and reorient himself. By then, Lucky said, all the food and water was gone. Exhausted passengers began to fall off the truck at night. The driver did not stop for them.

“The next day, we see ourselves, and we count ourselves and some people are not there anymore,” said Lucky, now 18, who after arriving in Europe lived for a year in a young people’s refuge in Catania, Italy.

A day later, the vehicle ran out of fuel. Helpless, the travelers milled about. That afternoon, a sandstorm barreled towards them.

“We were just standing, looking. We don’t even know where to go,” said Lucky. “We don’t even know how we can go out from the desert. So many people died on that spot.

“My friend fell down and died,” Lucky said. Everyone was crying.

“We didn’t know who was going to die next. We don’t know who is going to give up next. So what do you do? The whole place was sand, so we had to dig out the sand with our hands and we buried him.

“Then we started walking.”

UNDER COVER

The Sahara in northern Niger and neighboring Mali is home to drugs and arms traffickers, people-smugglers, kidnappers and armed Islamist militant groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda.

The European Union has put Niger and other countries under pressure to crack down on smuggling. In 2014, the EU opened a mission in Niger to train the security forces to “help prevent irregular migration.” Last year, Niger passed a law banning people-smuggling that could see smugglers jailed for up to 30 years.

But Brachet says that may have been counter-productive because it pushed much of the trade underground.

“It used to be, not impossible, but very difficult for somebody to abandon migrants in the middle of the desert,” said Brachet. “Now, as it’s clandestine, nobody knows if you really reach the point where you were supposed to drop your passengers off or not, or if you left them in the desert.”

An EU official said it is a priority to tackle people-smugglers and others who put the lives of vulnerable migrants at risk: The bloc does not control borders or patrol in the desert, but supports the authorities with training and advice.

The IOM, which has staff in northern Niger, is trying to gather better information about how many people move through the region, and what happens to them. It estimates that some 2,300 people pass through Agadez each week. But it recorded only 37 deaths in the Sahara in 2015.

Last March, IOM staff visited Seguidine, a small village in Niger close to the Libyan border. In one day they found 85 migrants stranded, waiting under trees, abandoned by smugglers, said Giuseppe Loprete, head of the group’s mission in Niger.

“The journey is very difficult,” said Loprete. “From what they tell us, the stories, a lot of people die on the route.”

The government of Niger did not respond to requests for comment.

Lucky said he and the other survivors walked for about 10 hours before they ran into a pickup truck on its way back to Agadez. They pleaded with the driver to take them the rest of the way.

He drove them to Sabha in Libya and sold them to militants who forced Lucky to work for free. It would be months before he could escape and make his way to Italy.

They left behind four men and two women in the sand – six more deaths that were never recorded.

(Gebrekidan reported from Catania, Martell from New York; Additional reporting by Masako Melissa Hirsch in New York, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Abdoulaye Massalaki in Niamey; Edited by Sara Ledwith)

Greece rages at neighbors amid fears migrants could be halted

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece raged at neighbors and began bussing hundreds of migrants back from its northern border on Tuesday, fearing it could be inundated with migrants halted by Balkan states trying to shut the main land route to Western Europe.

Athens filed a rare diplomatic protest with fellow EU member Austria for excluding Greek officials from a high-level meeting on measures aimed at curbing Europe’s biggest inward migration since World War Two.

More than a million migrants and refugees passed through Greece last year, and nearly 100,000 have already arrived this year. Nearly all reached Greece by sea and travelled onward by land over the Balkan peninsula to richer EU countries further north and west, above all Germany.

But several of the countries along that route have been taking measures to close their frontiers, prompting those further down the chain to impose similar restrictions to prevent a bottleneck.

Greek police removed migrants from the Greek-Macedonian border on Tuesday after additional passage restrictions imposed by Macedonian authorities left hundreds of people, mainly Afghans, stuck at the border.

About 450 of them were loaded onto buses to be taken to reception centres in Athens, joining hundreds more fresh arrivals from outlying Greek islands who arrived on the Greek mainland on Tuesday morning.

“I will continue on to Macedonia,” said Abdulah Farash, 21, a student from Syria. “My friend and I want to go on to Germany… it was important to reach Greece through Izmir,” he said of a Turkish Aegean port where many migrants set off for the passage to Greece. “Then things are easy.”

At the border with Macedonia on Monday, witnesses said Syrian refugees who did not have all travel documents, including passports, were turned back.

European countries are trying to slow the migration wave, which includes hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and other war zones, as well as large numbers of other migrants from north Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Austria is due to host west Balkan states on Wednesday to discuss efforts to manage and curb the flow, but did not invite Greece. In unusually heated language that shows how the migration crisis has raised passions across Europe, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias described the snub as a “unilateral and non-friendly act”.

“The exclusion of our country at this meeting is seen as a non-friendly act since it gives the impression that some, in our absence, are expediting decisions which directly concern us.”

Greece also accused its old foe Turkey of trying to “blow apart” an agreement that NATO would help patrol the porous sea border between Greece and Turkey to clamp down on human trafficking.

Turkey, which is hosting 2.5 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population on earth, says it is trying to stop them from sailing for Greece but needs more aid.

FINANCIAL CRISIS

Greece, still labouring under a financial crisis that has wrecked living standards at home, says it would not be able to cope with the influx on its own, if the onward passage of migrants through the Balkans is halted.

It says it cannot turn back thousands of people arriving on its shores daily in inflatable dinghies, citing international conventions.

Austria, the last country on the overland route to Germany, said last week it had imposed a daily limit of 3,200 migrants passing through, and 80 asylum claims.

Further down, Hungary has said it would shut three railway crossings with Croatia used by migrants, effective Feb. 22. Slovenia has erected a fence on its southern border with Croatia to ensure that migrants can enter only through official border crossings.

“The Balkan route was a humanitarian corridor. It could close after consultations and not by turning one country against the other,” Greek Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told Skai TV. “We are faced with an action that has elements of a coup.”

Vienna denied it had snubbed Athens by excluding it from Wednesday’s talks. The meeting of West Balkan nations was an established format which had first convened in Austria last year to discuss the issue of Islamist militants, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The meeting includes interior and foreign ministers from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

(Additional reporting by Alexandros Avramidis, Alkis Konstantinidis, Lefteris Karagianopoulos, Renee Maltezou and George Georgiopoulos in Athens and Francois Murphy in Vienna; writing by Michele Kambas)

Frontex: 68K migrants arrive in Europe last month, 38 times last January’s rate

Cold weather and rough seas did not deter the approximately 68,000 migrants who arrived in Greece last month, the European Union’s border protection agency announced Monday.

That number was 38 times higher than the number of migrants who made it to Greece last January, Frontex said in a news release, at the start of what was a record year for displacement.

Frontex has said more than 1 million migrants arrived in the European Union last year, nearly five times the 2014 total. Monthly arrivals topped 100,000 in July and remained at six-figure levels through December as refugees fled conflict-torn nations in the Middle East and Africa.

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says another 35,000 migrants traveled to Greece and Italy by sea during the first three weeks of February, bringing this year’s total arrivals above 100,000.

Only 13,000 people arrived in Greece and Italy in the first two months of 2015, the UNHCR said.

Frontex tried to place a positive spin on the migrant numbers released Monday, saying they represented a roughly 40 percent monthly drop from the 108,000 who arrived in Greece last December. The agency said winter weather contributed to the month-over-month decline.

But those who did arrive still added to a growing list of migrants who are seeking better lives in Europe, as nations face growing pressure as to how to cope with the massive inflow of people.

The vast majority of them arrive in Greece, the International Office for Migration (IOM) has said, as they are often shuttled on packed, unsafe boats across the Aegean Sea from Turkey.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Greece are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, Frontex said.

Others arrive in Italy, a destination for sea routes that depart from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Italy last month were from Nigeria, Frontex said.

The African nation is home to Boko Haram, which last year’s Global Terrorism Index dubbed the world’s deadliest terror group, and Fulani militants who have become increasingly deadly.

However, the migrants who are choosing to make the journey are also encountering some risks.

On Friday, The IOM, UNHCR and United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund on Friday warned of the increasing number of migrants who have drowned on their journeys to Europe.

Thousands of migrants trapped in Greece as neighbors tighten restrictions

ATHENS (Reuters) – Thousands of migrants were stranded in northern Greece on Monday after neighboring Macedonia demanded additional identification from people seeking to cross the border and head to Western Europe, witnesses said.

European leaders are concerned that migrants passing through austerity-hit Greece to more prosperous countries could end up stranded if Greece’s northern neighbors tighten border controls.

Greek officials say the flow of people across the border slowed after Macedonia demanded additional identification from people seeking passage.

About 5,000 people massed at two locations in northern Greece, close to the border with Macedonia, while aid groups urged another 4,000, who arrived on the Greek mainland from outlying islands, not to head to north for fear of creating a bottleneck.

“Our biggest fear is that the 4,000 migrants who are in Athens head up here and the place will become overcrowded,” said Antonis Rigas, a coordinator of the medical relief charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

Balkan states straddling the migrant route to western and northern Europe have begun denying passage to individuals not coming from the conflict regions of Syria and Iraq.

One migrant in his mid-30s, who said he was from the Syrian town of Aleppo, said Macedonian police did not let him cross the border because he did not have a passport.

“I lost everything in the war, I have no documents,” he said, declining to give his name. He said he had obtained Greek registration papers at the island of Lesbos.

Macedonia has erected a metal fence topped with razor wire at the main crossing point for migrants along its southern border with Greece.

Greek migration minister Yannis Mouzalas criticized his neighbors for shirking their responsibilities amid the crisis.

“Not only have Visegrad countries not taken in one refugee, they didn’t even send a blanket or a tent,” he told the TV channel of Greece’s parliament, referring to the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

They had not sent a ‘single policeman’ to reinforce the EU border agency Frontex either, he said.

Austria has invited Balkan states to a meeting on migration in Vienna on Feb. 24, a day before EU interior ministers are due to meet on the migrant crisis.

Vienna has angered other EU members by imposing a cap on asylum claims, limiting the number of migrants permitted into its territory to 3,200 per day, and introducing a daily cap of 80 asylum claims.

Its interior minister has said Austria could impose even stricter controls, a move that could trigger other countries north of Greece to do the same.

(Additional reporting by Fedja Grulovic; writing by Michele Kambas; editing by Katharine Houreld)

Austria takes migrant fingerprints on the border, then discards them

SPIELFELD, Austria/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – On the Austrian-Slovenia border, one of the last stops on the migrant route to Germany, a policeman explains that after his 12-hour shift taking new arrivals’ fingerprints, most are lost minutes after they are taken.

“We are not allowed to save the fingerprints,” the Austrian policeman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said as he sat in a tent at the Spielfeld border crossing. “We do what we’re asked to do.”

Austria, which saw 700,000 migrants crossing its borders last year, says it is not legally allowed to save and share with other European states more than 90 percent of the fingerprint data it takes of migrants fleeing war and poverty, a potential security problem at a major migrant hub.

It is only required to upload onto Europe’s shared fingerprint database, Eurodac, the data of those who actually apply for asylum in the country, which is less than 10 percent of those crossing into Austria.

So Austria takes digital fingerprints of everyone entering the country, checks whether they have a criminal record, but does not save the data if they want to move on to Germany, which most do.

Roz, a 28-year old Syrian mother of two, is surprised to hear that her family’s fingerprints are neither saved nor shared.

“They need to know who we are. If you record fingerprints of refugees, it guarantees security in this country,” she said as she was shown by Austrian officials onto a bus that would take her to the German border, her chosen destination.

ANACHRONISM

The situation highlights how European laws are far behind the challenges of the continent’s latest crisis, one that has already seen hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, mainly from Syria, flooding into the continent seeking a new life.

“That is a major problem, we have no records on these people, there are so many moving around the bloc and we have no trace of them whatsoever,” said one diplomat in Brussels, adding that some EU countries have tried to push for changes but they were blocked due to privacy protection concerns.

Berndt Koerner, deputy executive director of Europe’s border agency Frontex, said he was confronted with an “anachronism” in the sharing of migrant data.

“We are currently confronted with the problem that we cannot access certain databases, which can be used nationally in border controls,” Koerner told reporters this month.

The system was not changed even after the evident security problems in tracing the movements of the surviving Islamist militants involved in the Paris attacks last November.

Only states on the EU’s external borders, such as Greece and Italy, must save and share all fingerprint data.

Still, at a West Balkans summit in October all participants, including Austria, committed to registering, fingerprinting and uploading onto Eurodac all migrant data even on borders in the no-visa and border-control free Schengen zone.

Croatia and Finland, for example, save fingerprints of all migrants who arrive there, while Germany only lets in migrants who state they want to apply for asylum there.

Austria’s coalition of the social-democrat SPO and Christian-conservative OVP has come under pressure in opinion polls from their right-wing, anti-Islam Freedom Party rivals since the latest migrant wave arrived last autumn.

Drawing ire from Brussels and accusations it was breaking EU law, Vienna this month introduced daily caps on how many entries it allows across its southern borders and the number of asylum requests it will accept.

But even as the coalition seems to attempt to coax back voters worried about migration, the two parties publicly blame one another for failing to create the legal grounds to save the fingerprints as talks began on how to amend the border law.

(Additional reporting by Francois Murphy, Igor Ilic, Tuomas Forsell, Tina Bellon Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

More children, migrants drowning while trying to cross Mediterranean

More than 340 children have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in the past five and a half months, three agencies announced Friday, saying the death toll continues to climb.

The actual number of drownings could be higher, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. Refugee Agency said in a joint statement, because authorities may not have been able to recover every child’s body.

Still, the agencies said the current number of deaths equates to an average of two children per day since September 2015, as more migrant families try to reach Europe in search of better lives.

The U.N. Refugee Agency has said that more than 1 million migrants and refugees traveled to Europe by sea alone last year, most of them fleeing war-torn countries. More than 3,700 died.

In Friday’s announcement, the three agencies said migrants often travel in overloaded, poor-quality boats that place them at a higher risk of capsizing, particularly in rough seas.

“Clearly, more efforts are needed to combat smuggling and trafficking,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

The IOM says 90,756 adults and children have traveled across water to Italy and Greece during the first 49 days of 2016, and 411 of them have died. Some 7,461 have died since January 2014.

The agencies called for actions to ensure migrants travel safely, noting that many of them are currently trying to join relatives in Europe. They said some 36 percent of migrants are children.

“This is not only a Mediterranean problem, or even a European one,” IOM Director General William Lacy Swing said in a statement. “It is a humanitarian catastrophe in the making that demands the entire world’s engagement.”

Canada divided as 25,000 Syrian refugees settle in

TORONTO (Reuters) – Canadians remain divided about the resettlement of Syrian refugees, with some saying Canada should accept more despite a series of racist incidents that have marred a mostly smooth arrival of nearly 25,000 migrants, a poll showed on Friday.

Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected in October on a promise to accept more Syrian refugees more quickly than the previous Conservative government had allowed, but the original deadline for accepting 25,000 by the end of 2015 proved too ambitious and the timeline was extended by two months.

During his election campaign, Trudeau said a Liberal government would work with private sponsors to accept “even more” than the immediate goal of 25,000, and Immigration Minister John McCallum said in December the government could double the intake to 50,000 by the end of 2016.

A poll by the Angus Reid Institute released on Friday showed 52 percent of Canadians support the plan to resettle 25,000 refugees before the end of February, while 44 percent opposed the program.

The poll also showed that 42 percent of respondents want Canada to stop taking in Syrian refugees, while 29 percent said Canada should stop at 25,000 and 29 percent said the country should accept even more.

Some 21,672 Syrian refugees – sponsored by both private citizens and the government – have arrived in Canada since November, dispersing into more than 200 communities, according to the Immigration Department.

While the arrival has been smooth for privately sponsored refugees supported by families or community groups, hundreds of government-sponsored refugees have struggled to find housing and remain in hotels in Toronto, where the housing market is tight and expensive.

There has also been a scattering of racist incidents, including one last week in which graffiti was sprayed on a school in the western Canadian city of Calgary urging “Syrians go home and die” and “kill the traitor Trudeau.”

The prime minister responded on Twitter: “Canadians have shown the best of our country in welcoming refugees. That spirit won’t be diminished by fear and hate.”

In January, a group of Syrian refugees were pepper-sprayed by a cyclist in Vancouver, an attack Trudeau also condemned on Twitter.

(Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Sandra Maler)