Greece, a serious entry level for migrants into the EU, has supported harder immigration controls.
The European Union’s high migration official stated deportations had been a key precedence for the bloc’s government department as Greece grapples with massive numbers of individuals arriving within the nation illegally.
“The difficulty of repatriations is one thing that we completely have to handle,” European Immigration Commissioner Magnus Brunner instructed Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis throughout a go to to Athens.
The Austrian conservative, who took over migration and residential affairs on the finish of 2024, burdened the significance of implementation the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum.
The pact is a collective algorithm to handle the reception and relocation of asylum seekers and was adopted by the European Parliament final 12 months.
The reform, first offered in September 2020, goals to carry collectively all facets of migration administration, together with identification of asylum seekers, accelerated border procedures and refugee resettlement.
“There are some issues to do, clearly, some issues forward of us. The implementation of the compact is considered one of them,” Brunner stated.
Greece, a serious entry level for migrants into the EU, has supported harder immigration controls.
“Greece is a rustic that has been on the entrance line of the migration disaster for a lot of, a few years,” Mitsotakis stated, expressing satisfaction with shifts in EU coverage in direction of exterior border safety and a better deal with returns.
In a rescue operation on Thursday, Greek authorities responded to 36 migrants aboard a vessel noticed by a Maltese-flagged oil tanker 30 nautical miles (56 kilometers) southeast of the distant island of Gavdos.
Coast guard ships escorted the migrants to a port on the close by island of Crete, authorities stated.
The commissioner’s go to to Athens follows a current ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which discovered that Greece had illegally deported a Turkish citizen, describing the pushbacks as “systematic”.
Greece denies participating in pushbacks, claiming it has a “rigorous however truthful” migration coverage.
The nation recorded greater than 60,000 migrants arriving illegally in 2024. This adopted a virtually 50% enhance within the fee of arrivals by sea over the previous 18 months.
Greece is looking for direct funding from the EU to develop the border wall alongside the Turkish border.
Brunner’s agenda included conferences with Greek ministers for immigration, maritime affairs and overseas affairs, earlier than touring to Cyprus on Friday for additional discussions on migration coverage.
ANNOUNCEMENTIrregular arrivals are reducing
But the EU border company Frontex stated earlier this 12 months that the variety of folks coming into the bloc by way of irregular border crossings had fallen to a three-year low in 2024.
Preliminary information from Frontex exhibits simply over 239,000 irregular border crossings in 2024, the bottom determine since 2021, when migration was already diminished because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
