GENEVA, JANUARY 9 – As the EU’s newest member, Croatia, prepares to take over the bloc’s rotating presidency for the next six months, the UN refugee agency has issued a set of recommendations for better protecting refugees and stateless people in Europe and boosting financial support to refugee-hosting countries outside the EU.
The reccomandations include moving ahead with asylum system reform, including developing a sustainable system for sharing responsibility for new arrivals between Member States. The new EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said that she wants to break the deadlock in talks over the distribution of asylum-seekers in the EU. At a press conference on Wednesday, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said that the EU must figure out what level of burden sharing it can handle and that asylum reform would be easier if external borders were strengthened.
According to Frontex, the EU’s border agency, arrivals at the EU’s external borders fell last year to their lowest level since 2013 due to a drop in the number of people reaching European shores via the Central and Western Mediterranean routes. (@OnuItalia)
