Brussels, 04/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - The respective French and German Ministers of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve and Thomas de Maizière, began a three-day visit to Greece and Turkey to examine the migratory situation there.
During this trip, the issue of fake and stolen passports, particularly Syrian, will be discussed. At the end of January, France requested that a workgroup on the subject be set up (see EUROPE 11475).
This visit seeks to help clarify the progress made in the hotspots for registering and identifying migrants. Athens is still due to open 5 out of 6 of them. At the end of January, Greece made a commitment to speeding up the construction of these centres, as well as the construction of two refugee relocation camps. So far, 481 people have been relocated from Italy (279) and Greece (202) out of the 160,000 people that the EU made a commitment to redistributing over a two-year period.
The EU Ministers for the Interior think that Greece will continue having major difficulties registering migrants and at the end of January, called on the European Commission to prepare the legal groundwork for possibly activating, if necessary, article 26 of the Schengen Border Code, which will allow certain member countries to re-establish, in a coordinated way, internal border controls.
The Commission followed this request by setting out a number of recommendations on the lines of the Schengen Evaluation Mechanism, to begin with. It is possible that these recommendations could indeed be followed by the activation of Article 19 of the Treaty, which would subsequently lead to the invoking of Article 26 (see EUROPE 11481).
On Wednesday in Strasbourg, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, addressed MEPs and said that Europeans did not currently have any grounds “to be proud of our performance” in the way the migratory crisis has been handled. He said that “this is becoming a crisis of solidarity insofar as more coordination and more Union are needed”. With a specific reference to Greece, the President highlighted, the “serious shortcomings” identified in the Commission evaluation, which the country must rectify. He did, however say, that this “is not about isolating Greece, it is not going in that direction”, despite the fact that activation of Article 26 of the Schengen Border Code could be perceived as a means of putting Greece outside the Schengen area.
President Juncker also said that the efforts to help Greece had “limited scope, as long as the other member states did not apply the decisions already taken, particularly the increases in personnel in hotspot centres and in the area of relocation”.
At the end of 2015, the EU's external border management agency, Frontex, requested reinforcements of 775 coastguards from member states but only 447 were sent. The European Asylum Support Office requested 374 experts but only received 201 of them, according to Commission figures. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)