Prague, Sept 17 (CTK) – The Czech Republic wants to accept almost 200 refugees this year out of the total 1,500 it plans to accept by the end of 2017, the Interior Ministry said in a press release yesterday after a meeting of a working group assigned with the resettlement of the migrants.
Czech liaison officers will go to Italy and Greece, flooded by a wave of migrants, to assist in their transfer.
For the time being, Prague has decided to accept 400 refugees from camps outside Europe. The first 100 are to arrive later this year, including the families of Syrian child patients who are to undergo treatment in a Prague hospital.
Their arrival is scheduled for mid-October.
“The families will be placed in a temporary accommodation facility in Prague,” Pavla Novotna, deputy director of the Interior Ministry’s asylum and migration department, said.
She said the Prague archdiocese charity and the refugee facility operator will care for the integration of the refugees.
The Czech government previously also pledged to accept another 1,100 refugees from the overburdened Greece and Italy.
In these countries, the Czech liaison officers will coordinate the procedure of the acceptance of selected refugees.
“We are prepared to relocate the first 95 people in the next two months,” said Novotna.
The refugees in Italy and Greece in question are 40,000 people on whose redistribution EU agreed countries previously.
At present, further discussion has been underway concerning a mandatory redistribution of further 120,000 asylum seekers from Greece, Italy and Hungary.
As a result, the Czech Republic might accept more refugees, up to several thousands, according to some proposals.
The EU members have failed to reach agreement on the redistribution so far. Next week, the issue is to be discussed by the EU interior ministers and also by an EU summit.
More than 500,000 refugees have been registered at the EU’s external border in the first eight months of the year, according to the EU’s Frontex Agency.
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