Germany on Tuesday toughened rules for asylum seekers from the Balkans as Europe struggled to cope with a surge in refugees and migrants, with new figures showing more than 500,000 have crossed the Mediterranean this year.
Berlin added Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro to a list of so-called “safe” nations, so people claiming asylum from those states can be deported more swiftly to free up resources for refugees from war-torn nations like Syria.
Germany’s previous open-door policy to Syrians has sparked clashes with some eastern EU member states, in particular Hungary, which has taken a harsher approach and sealed its borders to migrants.
Photo: EPA
Budapest, which has drawn wide criticism for its hardline approach, on Tuesday went a step further, saying it would put forward proposals for global quotas at a UN conference. The tensions came as the number of refugees and migrants arriving via the Mediterranean showed no signs of abating, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) saying that 515,000 arrived so far this year.
About half are escaping Syria’s civil war, which has topped the agenda of the UN General Assembly in New York this week, and where UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to hold a meeting on the refugee crisis yesterday.
Reflecting the scale of the issue, the G7 group of leading economies and Gulf states on Tuesday pledged US$1.8 billion in funding for UN aid agencies helping Syrian refugees.
As part of that, Berlin said it would give an additional 100 million euros (US$113 million) to improve assistance for refugees in their home regions.
Germany has already committed billions of euros to helping asylum seekers, but with between 8,000 and 10,000 arriving daily in Europe’s biggest economy in the past four days, it is now looking to discourage economic migrants from clogging up the system.
“We want to send a clear signal to those [who are not fleeing war], do not come here, you have no chance, you will have to leave our country,” German Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere said.
Berlin is to reduce payouts, and seek to distribute benefits in kind rather than in cash to refugees.
In the first six months of this year, about 40 percent of asylum seekers in Germany came from the Balkans, even though their chance of receiving asylum was less than 1 percent.
Europe is also facing a tide of people making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, where the UNHCR said about 2,980 have perished or disappeared this year.
Highlighting the dangers, the Italian Coast Guard said it had on Monday coordinated the rescue of 1,151 refugees and migrants in 11 separate operations off the coast of Libya.
On the other side of the continent, a 20-year-old Iraqi was on Tuesday found dead in a lorry near the French port of Calais, crushed by pallets as he tried to reach Britain.
The discovery of the decomposing bodies of 71 people in a truck at the side of an Austrian motorway in August highlighted the dangers faced by those trying to get into Europe. A Bulgarian court on Tuesday ruled that a 32-year-old man arrested shortly after the tragedy would be extradited to Austria, charged with the negligent manslaughter, as well as belonging to a criminal gang.
Many refugees and migrants enter the EU through its eastern borders, then travel up through the Balkans and into EU member Hungary, bound for northern Europe — in particular Sweden and Germany.
However, the flow has been disrupted since Hungary closed its borders with Serbia using a razor wire fence, sending people flooding into Croatia, where authorities have been overwhelmed by arrivals. Budapest has also made it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to cross the border illegally, while giving the army the right to use rubber bullets on border patrols.
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