Strasbourg, 22/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - Meeting up this week in Strasbourg for its summer session, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has just delivered a severe call to order to the European Union and its member states, with regard to its "unfair" handling of the migration crisis.
The report at the heart of these debates is defended by the Dutch Socialist, Tineke Strik and it specifically focuses on "Refugees in Danger in Greece". The number of these refugees currently stands at 46,000, who are blocked on mainland Greece and a further 8500 on islands in the Aegean Sea.
The text points out that all of these refugees are denied "their fundamental human dignity" in "a country incapable of ensuring them a minimum degree of protection". The text also highlights the European Court of Justice's ruling against Belgium in 2011 for sending an Afghan asylum seeker back to Greece.
The Strik report, however, does not totally castigate Greece. It highlights the fact that this country is "without doubt the worst place of all EU member states to assume this responsibility". It also says that the country now finds itself stuck between "two brutal realities related to the response of Europe panicking in the face of the refugee and migrant crisis": namely, the closing down of the Balkans route and the EU/Turkey agreement.
In a resolution adopted by 115 votes in favour, with 9 against and 14 abstentions in the wake of the report, the EU therefore bears "a lot of responsibility for the current situation".
In the report, MEPs therefore call on the EU to "fully implement without delay the September 2015 agreements on the relocation from Greece to the other member states" and "to respond to the requests made by the European Asylum Support Office concerning the posting of national personnel to Greek asylum services". It should be pointed out that although 472 officials and 400 interpreters were called for in March and April last, only 63 of the former and 67 of the latter have so far been deployed and "it is still unknown whether they are operational in their new environment".
In addition to financial aid provided to those working on the ground, the text adopted also calls for the EU/Turkey agreement to be re-examined, "given the criticism made by the High Commission for Refugees, Médecins sans frontières and Amnesty International".
The text even goes as far as calling on the EU to prepare for the "possibility of the current approach failing" and planning in advance "alternative solutions to prevent the lack of preparation and reactiveness that has been so blatant in managing the crisis so far". (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)