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European Union ‘must take 6000 refugees a month from Greece, Italy’
Syrian refugees wait on a roadside after Turkish police prevented them from sailing off to the Greek island of Farmakonisi by dinghies, near a beach in the western Turkish coastal town of Didim, Turkey, March 9, 2016.
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A senior Turkish government official involved in the negotiations said Turkey would comply with worldwide law and that the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR would be involved.
“Personally, I think that Austria’s unilateral decision, and then those made subsequently by Balkan countries, will obviously bring us fewer refugees, but they put Greece in a very hard situation”, she said.
In return, Turkey wants billions of euros (dollars) in aid, visa-free access to Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, and a speeding up of Ankara’s efforts to join the European Union – demands that go too far for some. But he added: “I am more than optimistic we will achieve this goal”.
Belgian immigration minister Theo Francken meanwhile called for an “anti-drowning” plan to stop people dying in the Mediterranean.
In his annual report to the Human Rights Council, Zeid Raad al-Hussein said a draft EU-Turkey agreement on handling the migration crisis announced this week raises serious concerns, including “the potential for collective and arbitrary expulsions” from the bloc.
An EU definition of such a state refers to the Geneva Convention on refugees, with which Turkey does not fully comply.
Ankara had offered to take back all illegal migrants landing in Greece and to set up an arrangement to exchange Syrians in Greece for Syrian refugees in Turkey.
Of the four bodies found at sea, one was that of a six-month-old baby, rescuers said.
“If we do not manage to reach a deal with Turkey, then Greece can not bear the burden for long”, she told public radio MDR.
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Under the one-for-one deal, the resettlement places would be taken from an existing European Union plan to resettle 22,000 Syrians from camps in the Middle East and from 54,000 unallocated places from a slow-moving European Union plan to redistribute refugees from Greece and Italy.