Europe has proven it is “way below par in circumstances” with its new EU Migration & Asylum Pact, said on Wednesday SYRIZA’s Giorgos Psichogios, responsible for the party’s migration and asylum policy.
He said that each EU member state would now be legally required to accept their fair share of migration relocations based half and half on GDP and a receiving country’s population size. This, he said, is a kind of “compulsory solidarity but without a mandatory relocation mechanism, nor budgetary or financial sanctions for those states that refuse to share responsibility.”
In his statement, he criticized the new Migration Pact that Europe is succumbing to the pressures of the far-right and the Visegrad Group states, noting that the refugee-hosting countries and especially Greece are being forced into performing a faster asylum border process, involving decisions within 12 weeks, and proceed to return migrants whose asylum applications were rejected.
Furthermore, Psichogios criticized the Greek government, blaming it not building on Syriza efforts to “build a solidarity front among first-entry countries in the entire Mediterranean” instead of only those in the east.
He stressed that the government never pushed the EU for a new relocation program. He added, while New Democracy MEPs never signed a letter by 169 of their colleagues calling for the de-congestion of Greece and the proportional distribution of migrants across the EU.
