And more than a thousand blocked a train line on the Greek-Macedonian border.
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A group of Iranians have been staging a hunger strike and have sewn their lips shut in protest at the policy.
Hundreds of migrants stranded at Greece’s northern border clashed with police Thursday while trying to force their way into Macedonia.
“I want to go where I will be welcome”, he said, adding that he left his homeland some two months ago, and landed on the Greek island of Samos around ten days ago. “I will be hanged”, he said.
“All people have the right to seek asylum, irrespective of their nationality and to have their individual cases heard”.
Four Balkan governments, led by Slovenia, enacted measures on November 17 blocking access for refugees and migrants that could not prove citizenship from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, on the grounds that any migrants from outside these countries are ‘economically motivated’.
That prompted others on the route – Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia – to do the same, leaving growing numbers stranded in tents and around camp fires on Balkan borders with winter approaching.
“To classify a whole nation as economic migrants is not a principle recognised in worldwide law”, Rados Djurovic, director of the Belgrade-based Asylum Protection Centre, told the newspaper.
UNHCR had no information on whether the border curbs were linked to security fears over reports that one of the Islamic State militants who attacked Paris on November 13, killing 130 people, may have entered Europe posing as a migrant.
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Nils Muiznieks, human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe, said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press that since 99 percent of Syrian refugees and about two-thirds of those from Afghanistan are granted worldwide protection in Europe anyway, it was a “chaotic and inefficient policy” to make them take long journeys by land and sea while relying on human traffickers. Most of the attackers, however, were citizens of France or Belgium.
