Top EU officials stepped up pressure on members of the bloc to deliver on promises made over the weekend to address the refugee crisis, but countries on the front lines say they face difficulties in implementing the decisions.
Migration is “the biggest challenge we have seen for decades,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker Tuesday in a speech to Parliament in Strasbourg. He called once again on EU leaders to stop finger-pointing and stand by their pledges to help refugees.
“Member states are moving slowly at a time when they should be running,” Juncker said, adding that “the gap between pledges by member states and what is on the table must be reduced.”
European Council President Donald Tusk also sounded the alarm in remarks to members of Parliament, saying a failure to act risked tearing the EU apart.
“I have no doubt that this challenge has the potential to change the European Union we have built,” Tusk said. “It has the potential even to destroy achievements such as border-free travel between Schengen countries. And what is even more dangerous, it has the potential to create tectonic changes in the European political landscape.”
Only two days before, Juncker and Tusk had taken part in a mini-summit with leaders of countries along the Western Balkans migration route. The meeting produced a general agreement to impose tighter controls on the flow of refugees from the Middle East to Europe, and to provide shelter for an additional 100,000 asylum-seekers.
But officials said later that many of the operational details of the agreement — including which countries would host 50,000 of those additional refugees — remained to be worked out.
At their Sunday mini-summit, leaders of 11 countries, including three from outside the EU, agreed on a 17-point action plan aimed at controlling the flow of refugees along the Western Balkans route migrants use to move from Turkey to Greece and then north to Macedonia and Serbia before entering Croatia, moving on to Slovenia and Austria, often heading for Germany or Sweden.
The plan includes Greece providing shelter for an additional 30,000 refugees before the end of the year, plus another 20,000 with help from international organizations. An additional 50,000 refugees will be sheltered elsewhere along the Western Balkans route.
It also pushes for improved coordination among states, for the set-up of contact points in the ministers’ cabinet and for countries to stop waving through refugees without informing neighboring countries.
The Commission announced Tuesday that at least the contact points had been set up, and noted that Croatia had asked for the EU Civil Protection Mechanism to provide material support such as winter tents, beds and blankets.
There were other positive signs: Slovenian State Secretary from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Boštjan Šefic, said that his country’s cooperation with Croatia is improving after a week of tension along their shared border.
Yet many challenges remain, and Greece is being criticized by several other countries for its porous border and poor management of the migration flow.
Greek officials say they are still struggling to deal with the new plan. Discussion on the proposal during Sunday’s meeting was tense, as leaders pushed Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to do more to control his country’s borders.
Athens was asked to “create a ghetto for 50,000 refugees in Attica,” a Greek official said, referring to a proposal to build a single facility to host the additional asylum-seekers. But the plan was rejected by Tsipras, who also resisted calls for a new operation by Frontex, the EU border control agency, in northern Greece to check migratory flows towards Macedonia.
Instead Tsipras opened the door to Frontex doing more fingerprinting and registering migrants and refugees that had arrived on the island and to increase facilities to host up to 50,000 refugees in facilities across the country.
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But officials said it will take time for Greece to create these facilities and to finish setting up five “hotspot” processing centers to register and identify refugees and migrants.
“The planning of the Greek deployment is dependent upon the funding,” said Takou Eleni, chief policy adviser to Greece’s migration minister, adding that “it could take months.”
On Monday the Commission awarded €5.9 million to help Athens in coping with the flux of migrants. But Athens says it needs about €480 million, according to a Greek official.
The problem of relocating refugees within the EU has long been divisive for many countries, several of which have opposed mandatory plans to accept asylum-seekers. On Monday, the Dutch finance minister and Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem sought to step up pressure on some of those countries, suggesting that nations unwilling to do more on the relocation of refugees should receive less EU funds.
“We should maybe use the part of the EU budget that goes, for instance, to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, to finance the assistance to asylum-seekers in Turkey,” he said, according to Dutch news agency ANP.