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Refugee and migrant families queue to enter Macedonia at the Greek-Macedonia border near Idomeni, Greece.
Refugee and migrant families queue to enter Macedonia at the Greek-Macedonia border near Idomeni, Greece. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Refugee and migrant families queue to enter Macedonia at the Greek-Macedonia border near Idomeni, Greece. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

EU refugee relocation scheme is inadequate and will continue to fail

This article is more than 8 years old

Just 660 of 160,000 Europe agreed to share have been relocated as continent buckles under logistical and political weight of the crisis

In the slew of shocking numbers from the EU’s refugee crisis this week – 30 times as many people entering Europe in the first two months of this year as last; 70,000 likely to need urgent accommodation in Greece; between 2,000 and 3,000 new arrivals every day – one stands out.

Last September, after months of fraught discussions, the European commission unveiled a “decisive” EU plan to redistribute around the bloc 160,000 Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum seekers from the frontline countries of Italy and Greece over the next two years.

As of Friday, the EU’s only concrete, collective effort to find new homes for a small fraction of the 1.2 million refugees and migrants who, since January last year, have landed on its southern shores, has seen exactly 660 relocated.

According to the commission’s figures, just 17 member states have so far made 6,642 places available, about 4% of the promised total. The numbers they have actually taken in, which range from two in Bulgaria to 140 in Finland, add up to just 0.4% of the target (and to less than 0.05% of those who have arrived).

Politicians, officials and aid workers say the scheme, which Britain decided not to join, faces significant logistical, bureaucratic and above all political obstacles – and warn that as the migration crisis continues to grow, it risks in any event being swamped by events.

“Even if the plan was fully signed up to and operational, it is plainly too small given the scale of what Europe is now experiencing,” said Steve Symonds, Amnesty International’s refugee and migrant rights programme director.

They also stress that if this temporary scheme is not properly implemented, it will prevent the permanent one the European commission has acknowledged will ultimately be needed from ever seeing the light of day.

“Some people,” a Brussels official told Agence France-Presse, “are afraid this is going to fail. Some are losing hope. But some are also exploiting this loss of hope.”

A number of the problems are purely practical. States have cited a lack of adequate housing and educational facilities, as well as short-term difficulties organising charter flights.

Many of the French towns, for example, asked to host some of the 24,000 asylum seekers France has pledged to accommodate – it has so far welcomed 130 – did not have the right kind of housing, Kléber Arhoul, the national refugee coordinator, told a parliamentary hearing in Paris.

“Localities mainly had made four or five-bedroom houses available, believing the demand would mostly be from families,” he said. “Applications have come almost exclusively from single men. What we need is studios.”

Other countries have said delays and failings at the seven so-called refugee hotspots – set up under the scheme in Greece and Italy to identify, register and fingerprint new arrivals – pose administrative problems.

Several states, including France, Belgium and Sweden, have also stepped up security checks on asylum seekers since it emerged that some of the attackers who carried out the suicide bombings and shootings in Paris last November may have entered Europe as part of last summer’s refugee influx through Greece.

Others are reportedly selecting on religious or racial grounds: Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has vowed not to accept any refugees under the scheme, protested last year that Hungarians “do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country”.

EU refugee emergency relocation scheme

Greece’s minister for migration, Yiannis Mouzalas, said last month that some reception countries were “asking us [for refugees] not to be black, not to be big families, they ask us for more security”.

One western diplomat, who asked not to be named, said some countries were also “looking at questions like whether or not asylum candidates had relatives already in the country, or qualifications, a profession that might be more useful”.

But the relocation scheme is also failing because refugees themselves do not understand how it is supposed to work but see all too clearly that it is ineffective. Many also fear being sent to a country they do not particularly want to live in and not being able to move on.

“There’s no way you’re going to hang around, knowing if you put your shoes on and set off you stand a better chance of getting where you really want to be,” Symonds said. “The longer this goes on, the less chance there is that individuals who could benefit will stay put and apply in Greece.”

Arhoul says the competition between “the official relocation system, which is slow, demanding and restrictive … and the option to try to move freely to Germany, Austria, Sweden or France” has ended up “completely undermining the effectiveness” of the EU scheme.

It is possible, as Demetrios Papademetriou, head of the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute, has said, that some European countries are resisting the relocation quotas because they see “no end in sight” to the migrant crisis, and so to the demands they will face.

The biggest obstacles, however, are political. Last November, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and several high-ranking EU officials gathered at Athens airport to see off the first refugees to be relocated under the scheme, a group of 30 Syrians and Iraqis headed to Luxembourg.

EU refugee relocation scheme: how states responded

Tsipras conceded the 30 were “a drop in the ocean”, but said he hoped they would become “a stream, then a river of ... shared responsibility”. Italy’s interior minister made similar noises in January when 19 Eritreans boarded a plane for Luleå in Sweden, calling the flight “a symbol of hope”.

But anti-refugee sentiment and a mounting populist backlash spearheaded by the Visegrad group of countries, has seen a total of eight countries partly close their borders, particularly along the west Balkan refugee route to the migrants’ favoured destinations of Germany and Sweden.

Last month, along with Slovenia, Croatia and non-EU members Serbia and Macedonia, Austria – which has rejected Brussels’ criticism of its policy as “absurd” – imposed strict new restrictions, including a daily cap on the number of asylum seekers and migrants they would allow to enter their territory.

It was those restrictions that led to up to 10,000 refugees and migrants being stranded this week, in squalid conditions, at Greece’s northern border with Macedonia, near the small town of Idomeni, with hundreds more arriving daily.

As the EU announced a €700m (£540m) aid package for Greece to help it deal with the crisis, officials in Athens admitted it now seemed likely that the country would become a reception rather than a transit country for refugees and migrants.

For NGOs and aid agencies, the bloc is fast failing the test. “Too many states are opting for a chaotic, individual approach rather than the coordinated, ordered one the EU is pressing on them,” said Symonds.

The United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, condemned governments that were “not working together, despite agreements”, while Human Rights Watch was scathing of the EU’s “utter failure to respond collectively and compassionately”.

Aid agencies are increasingly alarmed about the humanitarian consequences. “The EU needs to start putting the needs of the people seeking its protection first if it wants to manage this crisis,” said Aurélie Ponthieu, Médécins sans Frontières’s migration expert.

In Brussels, the EU diplomat was equally harsh. “Unless countries can escape their domestic political agendas,” he said, “this scheme, which is already wholly inadequate, will continue to fail.”

More on this story

More on this story

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  • Refugees rush back to Greek camp amid rumours of open border

  • Turkey agrees to take back people who don’t qualify for EU asylum

  • Pressure builds in Italy after G7 leaders fail to tackle refugee crisis

  • Europe's more grownup approach to immigration

  • Hopes for refugee crisis plan fall into chasm between G7 and Trump

  • Mediterranean death rate doubles as migrant crossings fall

  • EU refugee crisis: asylum seeker numbers double to 1.2m in 2015

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