The proposal will see the new agency work with existing national coast guards and will strengthen the role of EMSA, the European Maritime Safety Agency, which is based in Lisbon.
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As such, Member States will be able to request intervention and joint operations including the deployment of the European Border and Coast Guard Teams to support these.
More than 45,000 people arrived in the Greek islands from Turkey since the beginning of December, monitor says.
The migrant crisis had undermined the authority of Schengen, because several European Union states, among them Germany, Austria and Hungary have re-imposed border controls.
The migration crisis has fuelled demand for more co-ordinated control of Europe’s borders, with the bloc’s security and passport-free area under threat.
“Strengthening Frontex, creating a kind of border guard would by all means be needed, beneficial”, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski reportedly said Monday.
The European Commission has unveiled a plan for a European border guard agency that would deploy to member states overwhelmed by migrants – whether those nations want it or not. Rescuing Greece from a messy departure from the only currency took years of time of time of grinding negotiations, & approval for the brand new border system might get bogged down in comparable procedures involving national governments & the European Parliament.
Greece in particular has been accused of failing to manage its border with Turkey, by allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees to stream into western Europe, mostly unregistered and un-fingerprinted. Whatever the final agreement today, the European Union must ensure that protection of borders does not come at the expense of the EU’s legal and moral duty to protect some of the world’s most desperate people.
Some of the measures include a rapid reserve pool of border guards and technical equipment in which it should be able to draw at least 1,500 experts that can be deployed in under three days.
Amnesty has also documented how people who attempted for example to cross the Greek, Bulgarian and Spanish land borders were pushed back by border authorities without access to asylum procedures or a chance to appeal their return, in direct breach of global law.
Our bloc has the obligation to help its neighbors to deal with a delicate humanitarian situation, said Juncker, in allusion to the existence of 2.2 million Syrian refugees and 230,000 asylum seekers from other countries in Turkey.
The plans will discussed by national leaders at a summit in Brussels on Thursday night.
The current staffing of Frontex, which serves to coordinate national border agencies, is around 400.
But the plan faces being severely watered down by EU member states and the European Parliament before the agency comes into effect.
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Many of those who have carried out Islamist attacks in Europe in the past two years have been European Union citizens who have fought in Syria and then returned to their home countries, notably to France and Belgium.
