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Refugees: It’s time for ‘bold action’
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A “BOLD” new plan to deal with the refugee crisis was unveiled by European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker yesterday as he called on EU states to agree as early as next week to relocate 160,000 refugees from frontline countries.
In his first State of the Union speech, Juncker urged EU states to look to historic values as it copes with the biggest flood of refugees since World War II, most of them fleeing conflict in Syria.
“Now is not the time to take fright, it is time for bold, determined action for the European Union,” Juncker said to applause from the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
“It is 160,000 that Europe has to take into their arms, this has to be done in a compulsory way. I call on the (European) Council to agree to take 160,000 at the interior ministers’ meeting on September 14,” he said.
Juncker was referring to a new scheme for binding quotas for the emergency relocation of 120,000 refugees from overstretched Italy, Greece and Hungary, combined with a similar scheme for 40,000 refugees in Italy and Greece that he unveiled in May.
But he warned EU member states against making religious distinctions when deciding to admit refugees as he recalled Europe’s past of religious persecution.
“There is no religion, there is no belief, there is no philosophy when it comes to refugees,” Juncker said. “We don’t distinguish.”
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron defended Britain’s decision not to participate in the scheme.
“If all the focus is on redistributing quotas of refugees around Europe, that won’t solve the problem and it actually sends a message to people that actually it’s a good idea to get on a boat and make that perilous journey,” Cameron told the UK parliament yesterday.
“Europe has to reach its own answers, for those countries that are part of Schengen. Britain, which has its own borders, has the ability to make sovereign decisions.”
Britain is exempt from EU asylum and migration policy and Cameron had already made it clear that the country will not be involved in any quota system.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned last week that the wave of mostly Muslim refugees coming to Europe threatened to undermine the continent’s Christian roots — an idea rejected by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Juncker meanwhile called for a more permanent refugee relocation mechanism “to deal with crisis situations more swiftly in the future.”
The commission would unveil a major new plan for legal migration to the EU in early 2016, in a bid to stem the number of refugees braving danger to come to the continent, he said.
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