The government in Germany brings back plans to have refugees sent back to Greece. The “news” comes at a time, when the extreme bad weather conditions have exposed the inhuman conditions thousands of refugees and migrants experience in Greece. But also at a time, when negotiations between Greece and its lenders are under way for a conclusion of the second program review, with the Euro Working Group to be meeting today and prepare the evaluation of the Greek bailout program in view of another ‘crucial’ Eurogroup scheduled for January 26th.
Citing reports German weekly Die ZEIT, writes that Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière wants refugees to be expelled to Greece under the Dublin agreement.
“The conditions in Greece are currently desolate,” Die Zeit notes.
German Government want to send Asylum Seekers back to Greece
According to the wishes of the Federal Government, asylum seekers could soon be transferred back to Greece. Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière (CDU) has asked the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) to suspend the takeover requests to Greece only until 15 March 2017, daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. The FAZ has obtained the letter de Maizière sent to the chairman of the Internal Committee of the Bundestag [German Parliament], Ansgar Heveling (CDU). The Federal Office should draft a proposal for the implementation of the EU Commission Recommendation.
According to a report, the German Government follows a recommendation by the European Commission issued beginning of December.
The EC proposed to the 28 EU Member States to reintroduce the so-called Dublin Agreement to Greece under restrictions. According to he information, people who entered before mid-March 2016, particularly vulnerable groups as well as unaccompanied minors, should be excluded. Moreover, Greece should give the Member State an “individual assurance” that the person concerned will be accommodated in a reception facility which complies with European standards.
The EU Commission pointed out at “clear progress made by Greece in setting up structures for a properly functioning asylum system.”
According to the Dublin Agreement, the EU Member State is responsible for an asylum seeker who entered its soil first.
For the majority of approximately 1.2 million asylum seekers who came to Germany in 2015 and 2016, that was Greece.
However, the implementation of the Dublin Agreement in Greece was suspended by all 28 member states since 2011 on the basis of the conditions laid down by the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.
German organization PRO ASYL sharply criticized the de Maiziere’s plans saying this would bring “an additional blow to the asylum system in Greece.”
The spokesman of the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Athens told the newspaper that in the foreseeable future there will not be many repatriations. In winter you can not send anyone back anyway. Many camps are “in terrible condition”; The people concerned would have to “live in ice, snow and morass”.
Athens also had to ensure proper accommodation and asylum procedures in a timely manner. Both conditions are currently not met.
According to the will of the EU Commission, a resumption of “Dublin transfers” is to be linked with an increased pan-European distribution of refugees, to which the EU states had agreed in 2015. The Brussels authorities had therefore called on the Member States to increase the number of monthly resettlement from currently about 1,000 monthly to 2,000.
So far, however, all the EU countries together had only 7,340 asylum seekers from Greece as well as 2,650 from Italy. – DIE ZEIT
So: the EU Commission that found out the camp conditions in Greece were “conform with the EU standards” in December, decided beginning of January that the situation was “untenable”.
It is very possible that the EU bureaucrats and former politicians live their myth of Always-Sun-in-Greece while their spend gray days in their triste but comfortably warm offices in Brussels.
I think the Migration and Refugee problem could be solved at a good proportion, once the European Commission would stop hiding its head in the sand.
a rare enstantane directly form the sand in Brussels
As for Germany… it has its own agenda and this is CDU’s populism in times of upcoming elections.
Greece has agreed to re-introduction of Dublin Agreement. how could it object it?
Here we go again the Brussels Mafia looking with closed eyes at a situation they have help cause and now blame others. It was not them that failed to send Greece the tools and personnel to deal with the problem, although they promised it, it was not them that promised to resettle thousands of migrants throughout the. E.U and the did nothing..
They sit in their comfortable offices collecting telephone number salaries and expenses and pontificate,, they have no idea of the problem on a practical level just on paper, they look at the costs surgest a solution that looks good to their political masters and their accounts, but do not consider the human cost or the conditions on the ground that make their solution unworkable and inhuman. They should be payed by results, they would then not earn a penny.
The Germans have no shame. They are the ones pushing the European Commission into this travesty and foolish nonsense, just as they are responsible for the eurozone mess.
Not only that: they have become a cruel, predatory, vampire of a nation that feeds on all Europe via their mercandilism and their export of deflation and corruption. Europe will be better off without them. Otherwise, it looks more and more that xxEXIT (xx=IT, GR, FR, etc) is the next option.