Brussels, July 20 (CTK) – Effective returning of migrants to their home countries is of key importance, while the present juggling with numbers of refugees that each EU member country should accept does not deal with the core of the problem, Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said yesterday.
Chovanec took part in a meeting of European interior ministers that again failed to agree on the redistribution of 40,000 asylum seekers currently staying in Italy and Greece.
“The total number has not been reached,” he said.
Chovanec said the EU countries offered to accept 32,000 of the asylum seekers.
In June, the EU member countries rejected the mandatory refugee quotas that the European Commission proposed and they agreed to accept the 40,000 refugees from Italy and Greece on a voluntary basis. Earlier this month, the Czech Republic offered to accept 1100 refugees. Germany and France offered about 9000 and 6700, respectively.
On the other hand, the EU countries pledged to accept about 22,000 people from refugee camps outside the EU who have the right to international protection, though the expected number was 20,000, Chovanec said.
He said the result of yesterday’s meeting is not a failure of either the Czech Republic or the EU.
“The 60,000 migrants may be just a drop in the sea unless Europe starts to promote its measures more effectively,” Chovanec said.
He said 60 percent of the asylum seekers do not have the right to stay in the EU, but only about 40 percent of them are returned to their countries of origin.
Chovanec said thorough registering of illegal migrants after their arrival in Europe has to be discussed.
The Czech Republic would like to have its representatives at these registration points, which Italy disagrees with, he added.
Luxembourg, which currently presides over the Council of the EU, will be further negotiating with countries that promised to accept lower numbers of refugees than expected, such as Poland, Slovakia and Spain.
Chovanec said he can understand that Hungary was building a fence at its border with Serbia in order to prevent the illegal migration.
He said Prague was ready to accept the first migrants at the end of the year. Most of the migrants would come to the Czech Republic next year.
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