The announcement came at the end of a long day of meetings in Brussels, during which Turkey is known to have asked for an additional $3.3bn in return for checking the flow of refugees across the Aegean Sea.
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All eyes centered now on March 17 and the start of a two-day summit to finalize the commitment and clinch an iron-clad deal which the leaders hope would allow for a return to normalcy at their borders by the end of the year.
Citing specific paragraphs in the EU’s asylum procedure directive, he said countries could refuse to consider refugee claims if there was a safe place to send them back to.
The scheme is key to managing the migrant influx, and the EU’s top migration official, Dmitris Avramopoulos, said that “if relocation does not work then the whole system will collapse ” .
Underlining the deep divisions cleaving the bloc, Merkel and Tsipras’ reactions flew in the face of the response of EU President Donald Tusk, who welcomed the route closure as being part of a collective response of the 28-member EU.
In remarks made at the House of Commons in London, Lidington said that since the U.K.is not a part of the Schengen agreement, Turkish citizens will still require the visa.
He added: “We have to be careful that people who fled from Aleppo (in Syria) and are in the European Union (.) will not be sent back”.
The EU-Turkey agreement has not been completed and further talks are scheduled for next week, but Slovenia and Serbia announced new restrictions on the entry of new migrants just within hours of the announcement from Brussels. Around 1,500 migrants and refugees are stranded at Tabanovce transit center for refugees in northern Macedonia, from whom more than 400 Syrians are on the border line with Serbia.
Turkey says its stiff demands are fair given that the country has already given shelter to nearly 3 million refugees from the Middle East.
Greece’s public order minister says refugees living in a squalid camp at the country’s border with Macedonia must accept that the border is shut and move to organized facilities. “We understand that it will take some time to sink in that they are not moving”.
If only. The EU-Turkey summit produced at best the elements of a deal that is supposed to halt the flow of refugees into Europe through Turkey and Greece.
Under the deal, the European Union would resettle one Syrian refugee from camps in Turkey in exchange for every Syrian that Turkey takes from Greece.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alexander Betts, director of the Refugees Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, said the plan was a set of “appalling proposals on all human rights and worldwide legal grounds ” “.
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Turkey’s European affairs minister Volkan Bozkir said Thursday his country would take back “tens of thousands” of migrants, “not hundreds of thousands or millions ” , and they would “not include the existing refugees on the Greek islands ” . These people could be stranded by the new border restrictions.
