Migrants try to get products from a truck at a makeshift camp on the Greek-FYROM border near the village of Idomeni on Thursday.
Advertisement
Croatia’s Interior Minister Vlaho Orepic told a news conference on Wednesday in Zagreb that the new decision meant reestablishing of a “regular border regime ” “.
“Clearly, Europe has made a decision to enter into a new stage of solving the migrant crisis”.
“This year and next some 567 refugees will be relocated to Slovenia from Italy and Greece”.
On Tuesday, police caught 127 migrants who entered Hungary, mostly through the fence with Serbia.
Austria and Balkan countries on the route from Greece to northern Europe began imposing border restrictions for migrants last month and halted crossings completely this week, following a meeting of leaders from the European Union and Turkey.
In exchange for stopping the influx, he demanded doubling European Union funding through 2018 to help Syrian refugees stay in Turkey and a commitment to take in one Syrian refugee directly from Turkey for each one returned from Greece’s Aegean islands, according to a document seen by Reuters.
More than 11,000 people are stuck in a backlog at Idomeni on the Greece-Macedonia border, in a transit camp designed for 1,500, according to Doctors Without Borders. Serbia’s Interior Ministry also said it would increase border controls with Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia, since Serbia can’t become “a collection center for refugees”.
The statement said that Amnesty opposed “the concept of a “safe third country” in general, as this undermines the individual right to have asylum claims fully and fairly processed”, and that there was “huge cause for concern” about sending migrants to Turkey in particular, “given the current situation and treatment of migrants and refugees”.
The UN human rights chief has denounced the growing “race to repel” migrants and refugees by some European governments, and said he plans to raise his concerns in Brussels before an EU summit next week.
Bozkir said the number of migrants that Turkey will take back would be “thousands” rather than “hundreds of thousands or millions”. About 5,000 of them are children and many are sick after spending days in the open, he said.
Vitsas told a state-run radio station: “Yesterday, we had about 700 people”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who has been the strongest proponent of a deal with Turkey – gave cautious support.
For Turkey, perhaps the biggest gain was the EU’s agreement to bring forward to June visa-free travel to the EU’s Schengen passport-free area for Turkey’s 75 million people, provided that Ankara honours its promises.
Tsipras said that Turkey had come to the table at the summit with “tempting proposals that surprised many people ” .
Advertisement
“The same criteria and rules apply for Turkey as for other countries willing to join the EU”, Neibler said, adding that even if the visas for Turkey are abolished, it should not lead to a subsequent entry into the EU without compliance with all other rules.
