EU governments have failed to deliver on the promises they made to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, the head of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker said on Friday (January 15) conference in Brussels.
EU governments have failed to deliver on the promises they made to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, the head of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker said on Friday (January 15) conference in Brussels.
According to his words the body he leads should not be blamed for the apparent failure of a flagship relocation policy. “It’s not the Commission that has not delivered,” he stressed. “But a number of member states have failed to fully deliver on what we need to do and what needs to be done.”
Juncker warned that Europe’s reputation was at risk, saying that “now we do appear as being the weakest part, and the poorest part of the world.”
Euronews reminds that more than one million migrants entered Europe in 2015, a large part of them fleeing conflict in Syria. In October, EU governments approved a plan to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers across the bloc amid stuff opposition from central and eastern European members. But just 272 people have been moved to other countries so far.
Wall Street Journal reports Juncker said that in the past few months, several countries, including Germany, have reintroduced border checks in an effort to better control the influx of migration. But making the checks permanent, over years, would call into question the very basis of the so-called Schengen area, a border-free, passport-free travel zone comprising of 26 countries stretching from Finland and Norway to Italy and Greece.
“Without Schengen and the free movement of workers, of citizens, the euro makes no sense. There is an intimate link between Schengen and the euro. What is the point of having a single currency for the continent if you can’t travel freely across the continent?”, he added.
