At a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday 18 October, together with Stelios Kouloglou MEP (GUE/NGL, Greece) and Vice-President of the European Parliament Dimitrios Papadimoulis (GUE/NGL, Greece), the mayor of the small Greek island of Lesbos, Spyros Galinos, urged the EU and its member states to respect their commitments to relocate migrants.
The politicians were speaking at a Solidacities event, a strategic European left initiative organised by 12 MEPs and launched at the European Parliament on Tuesday 18 October to be a genuine call for solidarity through a debate on the subject of looking after refugees between representatives of major towns and cities, civil society and left parties in Europe.
People are not numbers, but numbers sometimes speak volumes, said Papadimoulis. Lesbos is a small island of 85,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the Aegean Sea. In 2015, nearly half a million refugees, mostly from the Middle East, arrived on the island and 95,000 of them are still there in 2016.
We are raising our voices to have the decided measures and quotas respected by all the member states, but for this, procedures need to be monitored and all member states must comply with the decisions that have been taken, which is far from being the case, said Papadimoulis. The financing that arrives in Greece for refugees comes extremely late and is largely from non-governmental organisations rather than the Greek civil service.
The EU-Turkey agreement puts obstacles in our path. The three main refugee camps on Lesbos now house nearly 6,500 people although their maximum combined capacity is for 3,500. Galinos is calling for the burden to be shared among European towns and cities. The agreement between the EU and Turkey on migration is preventing any movement of refugees, which is ridiculous, he said, as the agreement is preventing the burden from being shared.
Delays in processing asylum applications and relocating refugees are building up in a number of member states. The delays are so bad that Galinos says they reflect a lack of political will that is threatening European integration. He said the EU is far too flexible with some member states, such as Orban’s Hungary, and its high time that everyone shouldered their responsibilities. (Original version in French by Thomas Régnier)