The EU executive has delayed making public its proposals for reform of Europe’s asylum system, seeking to avoid opening new controversy as national leaders try to finalize a deal with Turkey to slow migration.
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He said Turkey wasn’t engaged in any kind of bargaining with the European Union over the amount of money the country would receive to help improve the conditions of Syrian refugees.
Macedonia loaded about 1,500 migrants and refugees who had succeeded in crossing the border onto trucks and drove them back to Greece, Macedonian police said.
So far, the numbers of refugees relocated from Italy and Greece and shared out among the bloc have only been in the hundreds, a drop in the ocean compared to the planned 160,000.
“Macedonia needs and deserves help and assistance from the European Union because actually they’ve been protecting the southern border of the European Union”, he told reporters in Brussels. A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Idomeni, Babar Baloch, confirmed that many had returned to Idomeni.
With overloaded boats daily crossing the Aegean Sea towards the shores of the Greek islands of Lesbos and Kos, the number of people venturing in the direction of Idomeni keeps growing.
Migrants waiting to cross the Greek-Macedonian border walk over muddy puddles in a makeshift camp near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 15 2016. Hundreds of migrants and refugees walked out of an overcrow.
“The risk is that if, for the sake of expediency, the European Union defaults on its human rights obligations, then the reputation as being one of the principle standard-bearers upholding human rights around the world would be affected”, he said. They were later released and allowed to return to Greece. Nowhere does mistrust run higher than in neighboring Cyprus, which has been divided into a Greek Cypriot south and militarized Turkish Cypriot north since 1974.
Greece’s Deputy Defense Minister Dimitris Vitsas said he could neither confirm nor deny the reports.
An Austrian volunteer was among those arrested in Macedonia in connection to the unsafe river crossing undertaking by thousands of refugees, three of whom died in the process.
Mouzalas on Wednesday apologized, saying he made a slip of the tongue. Athens contends that the use of the name Macedonia implies claims on Greece’s own northern province of Macedonia.
Macedonian authorities said Tuesday they have sent back hundreds of refugees and migrants to Greece, a day after they bypassed a fence at a closed section of the border in a mass push to continue their journey north to Europe’s prosperous heartland – a move Greece blamed on “criminal misinformation” potentially spread by volunteers working with migrants.
According to Macedonian state news, 23 others were rescued from the river and lodged in a local refugee camp.
Macedonian National Security Council, a body presided by the Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov, would meet later to discuss the situation at the borders and the effects caused with the closing of the Balkan route.
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Ivanov called for better cooperation between Macedonian and Greek security services.
