The plan calls for the end of temporary border controls reintroduced by several member states and the restoration by the end of 2016 of full free travel across the 26-country Schengen zone.
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A draft document seen by The Associated Press on Thursday said the European Commission will make the move on May 12 “if the serious deficiencies in external border control were to persist”.
Eight EU countries – including Germany, Denmark, Austria and Belgium – have re-introduced checks at certain border crossings in response to the crisis.
Amid stark warnings from France over Britain’s possible exit from the European Union, the nations’ leaders held talks Thursday seeking common strategies over a deepening crisis over migrants and concerns over wider European security.
Diplomatic efforts have also done little to relieve the human misery along the Greek-Macedonia border where conditions worsened after a night of driving rain and plummeting temperatures.
He said he has made three attempts to cross into Croatia, but each time the Croats turned him back after seeing stamps in his Iraqi passports that show that he spent three months in Turkey on his way to Europe. They aim to leave financially wrecked Greece to seek asylum in a country that can offer them more, such as Germany or Sweden. “I’m not moving from here”.
More than 25,000 are now stranded in northern Greece on the border with Macedonia, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis.
Athens has been seething over a series of border restrictions along the migrant trail, from Austria to Macedonia, that has caused a bottleneck in Greece.
“We can not imprison people, that would contravene worldwide agreements”.
“We agree that the refugee flows still remain far too high”, Tusk said after meeting Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
Border slowdowns and closures along the migrant route through Europe have just meant that people are now piling up in Greece, overwhelming the country’s resources, Merkel said at a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande in Paris.
The ill-fated scheme casts doubts on a separate plan to resettle refugees from Turkey in exchange for sending back non-Syrians entering Greece.
On Thursday, Mr Tusk warned illegal economic migrants against coming to Europe. Do not risk your lives and your money.
“It is all for nothing”, he said.
The Swedish center-left government said on Friday it would scrap payments of daily allowances to refugees who have had their asylum applications rejected in what was its latest attempt to curtail a record influx of immigrants. More than 10,000 mostly Syrian and Iraqi refugees were stuck at the country’s Idomeni border as Greek offici…
In Brussels, the Commission presented a step-by-step plan to implement agreed or already-proposed measures – including a new European Union border and coast guard – to curb the influx after more than a million people arrived in an uncontrolled stampede in 2015.
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Some 200 people were allowed through between Friday and Saturday, with Macedonian police calling into question registration documents handed to refugees by Greek police at the islands.
