Athens/Lesbos, Feb 11 (CTK special correspondent) – Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek has offered ten million crowns to Greece for devices to verify fingerprints, he told reporters after a meeting with his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias on Thursday.
The Czech Republic would thereby like to contribute to thorough checks of migrants in hotspots, detention centres where refugees should be registered, he added.
“The government has decided to provide the means for Greece exactly for the devices scanning fingerprints and enabling these data to be part of a European database,” Zaoralek (senior government Social Democrats, CSSD) said.
On Tuesday, Zaoralek offered the same sum to the representatives of the Turkish province of Izmir where refugees are concentrated before leaving for Greece.
The ten-million-crown support should be used for the Turkish coastguard or a humanitarian aid project, Zaoralek said.
Zaoralek also visited the Moria hotspot on Lesbos island on Thursday.
According to CTK sources, Zaoralek has been the first foreign minister of an EU member state to visit this centre and get acquainted with its functioning on the spot.
Greece has been criticised for its hotspots not working properly.
After his meeting with Kotzias, Zaoralek said Greeks had promised to improve the situation by March.
Another persistent serious problem is the readmission or returning of economic migrants, he added.
“There are areas in which work should be considerably improved, such as the possibility to return economic migrants back to the countries like Turkey,” Zaoralek noted.
The European Commission (EC) in its report from late January assessed that Greece had serious shortcomings in the border protection and it called on Athens to redress it. A three-month deadline for Greece to remove the mistakes is likely to start on Friday.
If the situation did not change, the Schengen Area countries can temporarily resume border checks. As a last resort, Greece could be expelled from Schengen, which has been talked about openly in the EU.
According to statistical data of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from February 10, 68,000 people have come to Greece across the Aegean Sea since the beginning of the year, while some 10,000 arrived in February alone. On average, 1,300 people get to Greece a day.
