Luxembourg, 20/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - Commissioner Franco Frattini announced on Friday that he was going to make €7 million available for assistance to countries of the Union particularly affected by the arrival of large numbers of Iraqi refugees. The aid comes from the €15 million budget of the Solidarity and Management of Migration Flows fund.
Externally, the Commission had already announced on 18 April that it had earmarked some €10 million to support Iraqis fleeing their war-torn country. Franco Frattini had sent a letter to the EU27 home ministers on 5 April reminding them that the financial assistance provided for the Iraqi refugees for the year 2006 amounted to €11.2 million. These sums have been used not only to assist refugees fleeing from their homeland to go to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, but also to help those suffering inside Iraq, Mr Frattini said. He was also willing to envisage financial support for the activities of the UNHCR in the region via the AENEAS programme.
The Commissioner nonetheless considers that, from an internal European point of view, the situation gives cause for great concern. “It is clear that some member states are confronted with increasingly high numbers of Iraqi asylum seekers and that their reception and asylum systems are being strained”, he writes. Very diplomatically, Frattini was highly critical of the countries that has a “far more restrictive policy” than others towards Iraqi refugees. In his view, this does not reflect the EU's objective when it comes to a common asylum system. The Commission does not in fact have a legal instrument for compelling the states to take in a given number of refugees. In order to resolve this problem, the commissioner intends to call on experts to tackle these disparities early June so that, he says, there is “more consistency” in decision-making mechanisms. The results of these studies will be discussed during the next Council in June. According to the UN High Commissioner for refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country since 2003 to neighbouring countries, especially Jordan and Syria. In 2006, the EU took in around 20,000 Iraqi asylum seekers, with 9,000 in Sweden alone, which already has a strong Iraqi community, but also in Germany (2,000) and the Netherlands (2,000). Figures are all the more worrying as, since the beginning of 2007, Sweden has taken in 7,800 Iraqi refugees, the Commissioner says. The problem is that a large number of these refugees come from elsewhere in Europe, hence the idea of taking forward a “more coordinated approach” at member state level, Frattini concluded. (bc)