European
lawmakers have backed European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's
proposals for coping with a massive influx of migrants. The vast majority of
the people on the move have been heading for Germany.
Deutsche Welle, 10 Sep 2015
Members of
the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday voted overwhelmingly
to support Juncker's proposals, with 432 voting in favor of the non-binding
resolution and just 142 against, with 57 abstentions.
A statement
posted on the European Parliament's website said the lawmakers backed the
Commission's proposal to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers from Italy, Greece and
Hungary. This came a day after it backed an emergency proposal for relocating
40,000 asylum seekers.
It also
said that a majority of lawmakers believed that the bloc's "Dublin
rules," which determine in which member state any given migrant is
required to register, should be amended through a "fair, compulsory
allocation key" taking into account "the integration prospects and
the specific cases and needs of asylum seekers themselves."
The MEPs
also expressed support for the idea of drawing up a common EU list of safe
countries of origin and a compulsory resettlement plan under which members
states would be required to take in refugees from third countries.
As #refugeecrisis intensifies, #migrationEU becomes a common challenge. Learn more http://t.co/UE1bqUyRc6 pic.twitter.com/EdiaGYX3Vl
— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) 10 september 2015
More
important than the consensus in Strasbourg though, is how the bloc's 28
national governments react to Juncker's proposals.
EU interior
ministers are to meet on Monday to discuss the proposals and several eastern
members of the bloc have already expressed their opposition to a compulsory resettlement
plan.
The MEPs
also called on the EU's foreign policy coordinator, Federica Mogherini to
convene an international conference on refugees "with the aim of
establishing a common global humanitarian aid strategy." They said that in
addition to EU officials, it should include representatives from all of its
member states, United Nations agencies, non-governmental agencies, the United
States and Arab countries.
The
European Union is experiencing an influx of migrants from the south that is
unprecedented in the history of the bloc. While Germany alone is expecting to receive around 800,000 migrants by the end of 2015, some European countries
have said they are determined to take in as few as possible. While many of the
migrants have come from war zones such as Syria, many have also come from the
western Balkans, where no major conflict currently exists.
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