Greece insists it's ready to register all migrants

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Greece insists it's ready to register all migrants



ATHENS: -- Just hours before EU leaders meet in Brussels to discuss the issue, Athens has announced the opening on Wednesday of four migrant reception centres on some of its islands near Turkey.

It may not satisfy the rest of the EU however, which had demanded that Greece open five centres by the end of last year.

Touring one of the registration centres on the island of Leros, the Greek defence minister Panos Kammenos insisted that officials can now properly document and fingerprint all the migrants arriving on its shores.

Migrant men, women and children are now expected to stay between 48 to 72 hours at the registration centres before moving to Greece’s mainland, and from there to the next leg of their long journey towards central and northern Europe.

On Tueday the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that 84,320 migrants, many of them refugees from the Syrian war, reached Europe by sea since the beginning of the year, while 410 died or went missing.

Greece has been accused of allowing the migrants, most of whom want to reach Germany, to pass through its borders un-fingerprinted and un-documented.

Athens says the burden it is assuming in the migrants crisis is disproportionate, adding strain on a nation reeling from six years of deep recession induced by austerity under the terms of three international financial bailouts.

It says numbers are too big to handle, that it cannot turn back boatloads of refugees and migrants into the sea, and that Turkey do more to stop the migrants at its shores.

Nevertheless there has been talk of shutting Greece out of the the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone entirely although the EU president Donald Tusk has been quick to dismiss the idea.

What is clear however is that one of the main principles of the union, the free movement of its citizens, is now in jeopardy.


-- (c) Copyright Euronews 2016-02-18