However the country, battling its own economic crisis, has struggled to provide adequate services to many refugees arriving on Greek shores, with serious humanitarian concerns over the conditions greeting migrants.
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Frustration has risen in recent weeks in the European Commission, the EU executive charged with ramping up controls on the external borders, and among EU governments that Greece is failing to make use of available EU funds and personnel to ensure people arriving in the Schengen area are documented.
He said work was moving ahead on building migrant screening centers on Greece’s Aegean Sea islands.
Limitations are being placed on refugees and migrants from countries other than Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq along, causing tensions at Idomeni, on the Greek side of the border, which have led on several occasions to violence and a temporary closure of the border, according to a news release issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Scuffles have broken out between migrants and refugees at Greece’s northern border with Macedonia, after hundreds of people blockaded the crossing in protest because they were not being allowed to cross the border.
Some central European officials, most prominently Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, have suggested excluding Greece from Schengen.
Over 500,000 migrants have entered Europe so far this year and approximately four-fifths of those have paid to be smuggled by sea to Greece from Turkey, the main transit route into the EU.
Stranded migrants prepare to throw stones at refugees, background, who are waiting to cross the Greek-Macedonian border, near the northern Greek village of Idomeni, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2015.
Groups of people from other countries have set up makeshift roadblocks in retaliation.
The victim, believed to be a Moroccan citizens, died when he climbed “onto a carriage of a stationary train near the border and touching a high-tension cable overhead”, local police spokesman Petros Tanos has been quoted as telling AFP.
And in an interview published on Thursday, Donald Tusk, the former Polish premier who chairs European Union summits, said irregular migrants should be detained for as long as needed to check their identities, up to the 18 months allowed by law.
Frontex now has 195 officers on Greece’s Aegean islands most affected by migratory flows, identifying migrants and collecting intelligence about people smuggling networks.
While suspension from the Schengen accord would directly affect Greeks travelling to the 25 other members of the passport-free zone, it is unclear what effect it would have on the migrant crisis.
“That’s something we must avoid at all costs and it’s why, until Friday, we still have… a few days to show that Greece is making progress”, the veteran European Union negotiator said, insisting he had put no “pressure” on officials in Athens on Monday. “This would mean the collapse of Schengen of Europe”, said Ioannis Mouzalas, the Greek minister for migration. The door is in Turkey.
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Senior officials in Brussels have been briefing that there was frustration amongst some European Union member states that Greece had not sought help in the past.
