Immigration is high on the agenda of a meeting Friday in Athens of southern European leaders.
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Migration spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis said on Friday that his country, which hosts a bulk of the refugees in the continent, can not afford to take in more asylum seekers from other European countries.
Greek authorities registered more than 3,300 unaccompanied asylum-seeking and other migrant children who arrived in Greece in the first seven months of this year, HRW said. “That would be outrageous”.
Under the so-called Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers may be sent back to their first country of arrival in the European Union to have their application processed there.
More than 850,000 people – majority fleeing conflict in war-ravaged Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – arrived on the Greek islands previous year alone after risking their lives in unseaworthy boats and dinghies.
Southern EU leaders on Friday called for revised asylum rules to fight the ongoing migration crisis, and appealed for unity ahead of a showdown on the post-Brexit future of the bloc.
“That will create an ever greater strain on (Greece’s) asylum system and reception capacity”.
“Unless there is an effective means of redistribution across the European Union, a revised Dublin system will force refugees upon receiving states closest to the external border, above all Greece, Italy and to a lesser extent Spain”, Brad Blitz, migration expert and professor of worldwide politics at Middlesex University in Britain, told the the Associated Press news agency.
They also want an external border force set up by the end of the year, and more intelligence sharing on terrorism.
The talks are being held just over a week after the European Commission ruled that technology giant Apple didn’t pay the correct volume of tax in the European Union for more than a decade, a mounting bill that analysts say could constitute 19 billion euros ($21 billion) with interest.
Fearing a surge in anti-migrant sentiment across the EU, Greece is pressing member states to abide by commitments made for a relocation program – that has covered less that 10 percent of the 33,000 placements promised to migrants in Greece so far.
Manfred Weber, head of the European People’s Party, the largest in the European Parliament, was even more scathing.
The summit is expected be the beginning of a series of other meetings of that kind.
“There are problems, a negotiation is under way. we hope for the best”, he said.
The leaders of Portugal, Malta and Cyprus are also present, though Spain’s acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy skipped the meeting amid desperate efforts in Madrid to form a coalition government.
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Tsipras aims to gain support for an anti-austerity push, a direct challenge to Berlin’s demand for increased belt-tightening, ahead of a mid-September EU summit in Bratislava for the 27 states that will remain after Britain leaves.
