The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Germany drops EU rules to allow in Syrian refugees

Country has suspended deporting asylum-seekers from Syria under the EU’s controversial Dublin Regulation

 

Syrian refugee girl from Kobani cries as she hugs another refugee, moments after arriving with other Syrian refugees on a dinghy on the island of Lesbos, Greece

Many Syrian refugees are entering Europe via Greece via arduous sea journeys Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
  

Germany has quietly stopped enforcing European Union rules under which Syrians fleeing the civil war face deportation, it has emerged, as thousands of migrants continued to pour through the Balkans towards Western Europe on Monday.

The move came as Chancellor Angela Merkel and her counterpart Francois Hollande called for an overhaul of the EU’s asylum system, following emergency talks on the migrant crisis in Berlin.

An official source confirmed reports Germany has suspended deporting asylum-seekers from Syria under the EU’s controversial Dublin Regulation.

Under the rule, migrants can only apply for asylum in the first EU member state they enter, and face deportation if they try to apply in another.

But Germany, which has long complained that the Dublin system is failing, has now ordered its officers to process applications from Syrians even if they have made their way through other EU countries.

Refugees wait in line for aid inside a temporary tent camp in Dresden, Germany

Refugees, many from Syria, queue up for aid from the German Red Cross in Dresden  Photo: Getty Images

 

“Germany and France expect all member states implement fully the right of asylum,” Mrs Merkel, the German chancellor, said after meeting with the French president.

“We must implement a unified asylum system,” Mr Hollande said.

“There are moments in our European history when we face an exceptional situation. Today is an exceptional situation but it is an exceptional situation that will continue.”

The two leaders both called for migrants to be shared more evenly between EU states.

Germany has complained for some time that the Dublin rules are abused by other member states to avoid taking migrants, and campaigned for them to be scrapped.

The two leaders called for a common EU list of “safe countries” in order to separate genuine refugees from economic migrants, and for new EU registration centres planned for Italy and Greece, where most migrants arrive after crossing the Mediterranean, to be set up by the end of the year.

They were speaking after violent far-Right protests against a shelter for migrants in Germany left more than 30 police officers injured.

Riot police intercepts hooded people trying to enter the area near the security zone around a former hardware store that has been turned into an emergency shelter for refugees in Heidenau, Germany

German riot police intercept people trying to enter the security zone set up for refugees  Photo: ARNO BURGI/EPA

 

Police fought battles with protesters hurling bottles, stones and fireworks and chanting Nazi slogans for three nights running in the town of Heidenau in Saxony, close to Dresden.

“It’s disgusting, how right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis are trying to preach dull hate messages,” Mrs Merkel said yesterday.

Mrs Merkel and Mr Hollande are believed to be pushing for an EU summit on the migration crisis.

But Jean Claude-Juncker, the European Commission president, said there was no need for a summit.

Mr Juncker, who has struggled to win support for EU quotas to distribute 60,000 migrants through the continent, said leaders must show “courage” and take unpopular decisions.

“What we need, and what we are sadly still lacking, is the collective courage to follow through on our commitments – even when they are not easy; even when they are not popular,” he wrote in France’s Le Figaro newspaper.

“Instead what I see is finger pointing – a tired blame game which might win publicity, maybe even votes, but which is not actually solving any problems,” he wrote.

In the Balkans, there were scuffles between Macedonian police and migrants on the border with Greece, as they let through a trickle of people trying to head north through the Balkans to Hungary, a member of the Schengen free movement area and a major point of entry to the EU. Since the border was reopened following clashes over the weekend as police tried to keep out migrants, nearly 10,000 people have poured through the country and on into Serbia, including some pushed in wheelchairs and wheelbarrows, or moving on crutches.

Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian foreign minister, yesterday shook hands with migrants as he visited the border, and said Greece needed to do more to control its northern border.

“This is a humanitarian disaster. This is a real disaster for the whole European Union and I think there is the real need to have more focus on this problem, not only on the route through Italy but also on the route on the Western Balkans,” he said.

Migrants, largely from Syria, Eritrea, Sudan and Afghanistan, are following a route north from Greece into Macedonia and Serbia, and then onto into Hungary and richer EU countries such as Austria, Germany and Sweden. Hungary is rushing to build a fence to block the flow.

A member of the Red Crescent carries a girl as they rush away from a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus on Monday August 24

A member of the Red Crescent carries a girl as they rush away from a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes by forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus on Monday August 24  Photo: Reuters

 

In Austria, police said 37 people were injured – seven seriously – when two vans packed with as many as 90 migrants collided Monday near the Hungarian border. Dozens more migrants fled, along with the suspected smugglers.

The flow of people across the Mediterranean sea continues.

Greece’s coast guard was searching for at least five people missing at sea after the dinghy they were using to cross from Turkey overturned off the coast of the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos.

The coast guard said it had rescued six people and recovered the bodies of two men, and was searching the area for the missing. The two told authorities they had been in a boat carrying about 15 people when it overturned.

The Greek coast guard said it had picked up 877 people in 30 search and rescue operations from Friday morning to Monday morning near the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos. The figures do not include the hundreds that manage to make it to the islands themselves, mostly in inflatable dinghies.

The Greek government said its infrastructure is unable to cope with an influx, in what the EU has described as the gravest migration crisis since the second world war.

Reception centres on Lesbos are squalid, overflowing and face shortages of children’s milk and electricity, Amnesty International said.

On Saturday alone, the Italian coastguard plucked 4,400 people from the Mediterranean coast off Libya in 22 different rescue operations. They included 440 people in four flimsy dinghies rescued by the Royal Navy’s survey vessel, HMS Enterprise.

 

 

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