Germany’s Pro Asyl organisation on Friday criticized an EU migration deal and warned it could serve as a blueprint for other parts of the world.
“What was decided yesterday de facto is a coalition of the unwilling who are saying ‘we’ll call it asylum reform but in fact, we will outsource the protection of refugees to third countries outside of Europe,” said the organisation’s Karl Kopp.
Pro Asyl has been lobbying for the interests and rights of asylum seekers for decades.
Kopp said what the EU called “historic” was in fact “a terrible sign to the world: a big club of 27 democracies says ‘refugee protection, yes, but please not here.”
The agreement would introduce a new expedited border procedure for those deemed unlikely to win asylum to prevent them from lingering inside the bloc for years.
Poland and Hungary – among the EU’s loudest voices against accepting sea immigrants – opposed the deal, saying the bloc’s national leaders should return to the matter when they meet later in June. That, however, did not scupper the majority deal.
The Association of Germany’s Districts, Landkreistag, welcomed the “long overdue” decision and said the districts’ “capacities to accommodate and especially to integrate the refugees are exhausted.”
“We have taken in one million refugees from Ukraine and we still have a lot of the refugees who came here in 2015 and 2016 and just in the first four months of this year, we have taken in 100,000 refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey and northern Africa,” Kay Ruge of the Landkreistag told Reuters Television.
Source: Reuters
