Refugee crisis
(Brussels) “I welcome the efforts made by the member states in the last few months in rehoming and resettling programmes. This is the genuine, factual embodiment of Europe’s solidarity, which adds up to the huge efforts made by the member stats to take in and host over 1.2 million asylum seekers in 2015 alone”. This is the first comment made by the EU Migration Commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, as he presented the EU Executive’s migration report. Dimitris Avramopoulos has to add, though: “with dozens of thousands of refugees waiting to be rehomed in Greece and still a lot of refugees arriving in Italy, this positive trend must be continued and strengthened. The EU Commission will keep supporting the member states with all the available means to further speed up the implementation of the rehoming and resettling mechanisms”. In the last month, precisely from June 14th to July 11th, 776 people have been rehomed. The total number of people that have been rehomed so far has therefore risen to 3,056: 2,213 in Greece and 843 in Italy. “We are still quite far – the report states – from the EU Commission’s goal of rehoming 6 thousand people a month. The member states are not yet meeting the obligations they undertook as part of the EU Council’s decisions on rehoming”.
