A meeting held Sunday between the president of the EC, Jean-Claude Juncker, and leaders from 10 European countries, allowed to agree on a program to strengthen border security, refugee care, and the possibility of repatriating immigrants.
Juncker said that the agreement calls for an end to the transfer by train or bus of thousands of refugees on the journey from one border to another, without the consent of the neighboring country, as happened in Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia or even Slovenia.
Former Prime Minister of Luxembourg defended the urgent need to provide shelter, since it cannot be that in the Europe of 2015 people are left to their fate and sleeping outside, he said.
The compromise agreed on Sunday by Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Macedonia, Greece and the EC provides for an increase in the capacity in the reception of refugee up to 30,000 places in Greece, before the end of the year.
In addition, it is expected that the UN agencies provide housing allowances and family programs for some 20 thousand people. The capacity to take in 50,000 refugees must also be created, up to a total of 100,000 throughout the Balkans.
The initiative proposed by Juncker includes the deployment of 400 European policemen within a week in Slovenia, a country of only two million people, where about 60,000 undocumented immigrants arrived since the last 17th.
The plan also refers to efforts to increase deportations of people without the need of international protection, for which actions should be coordinated with the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq.
Most of the more than 400,000 refugees who arrived in Europe in 2015 via the Balkan route, come from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, affected by conflicts spurred largely by the external action of the West.
The plan calls for strengthening the Poseidon maritime operation, near Greece, and increase the actions of the European external border monitoring agency Frontex, in the Aegean Sea, where the undocumented come from refugee camps in Turkey.
The compromise is in favor of involving the European Investment Bank, and the European Reconstruction and Development Bank in financing refugee shelters, as well as speed up the police cooperation in the fight against human trafficking.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees denounced the inhumane conditions and the mistreatment of immigrants crossing the Balkans to reach rich countries like Germany or Sweden.
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PL-24/MNA
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