The Guardian — European countries have relocatedjust 0.17% of the asylum seekers they promised to welcome four months ago, it has emerged, in a revelation that campaigners say is the latest failure of Europe’s confused response to the continent’s refugee crisis.
EU officials announced this week that just 272 Syrians and Eritreans have been formally transferred from the countries on the frontline of the migration crisis, Greece and Italy, to countries elsewhere in the continent. It constitutes 0.17% of the 160,000 refugees that EU members pledged to share at a summit in September, and 0.03% of the 1,008,616 asylum seekers who arrived by sea in 2015.
Europe’s slow response stands in sharp contrast to the accelerating nature of the crisis, with the daily arrival rate to Greece now 11 times higher than it was in January 2015. On Tuesday, at least 34 people died in the Aegean sea between Greece and Turkey in the first such shipwrecks of 2016.
Many of those who do reach Greece are nominally supposed to be shared between other countries in the EU, under the terms of the September agreement. But according to figures released this week, 19 EU countries have not relieved Greece and Italy of any asylum seekers, while those that have are largely the countries that are already bearing a significant share of the continent’s refugee burden, such as Sweden and Germany.
European countries have also failed to provide the full quota of border guards they pledged to send to Greece and Italy in September – with just 447 guards provided out of a promised 775. Hungary, one of the loudest proponents of a more heavily fortified European border, has seconded just four guards to border duty in Greece and Italy.
“Many of the people that this is supposed to affect are not making the [asylum] claims in Greece and Italy because they don’t trust the system and are therefore prepared to move on in their own way,” Symonds said.
He added: “It really shows a failure of all states to properly commit themselves to this from the start. It has never got off the ground and the UK’s decision even before the relocation [to opt out of the process completely] has not encouraged other states to participate. Although they’ve formally signed up, they’ve done so without any commitment.”
Greece and Italy’s foreign ministries did not make any spokespeople available for comment.
