‘No room for refugees in Denmark this year’

NGO resumes rescues off Libya

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Sept 9, (Agencies): Denmark’s minority center-right government doesn’t want to accept any refugees this year that come into the country under a UN quota system, an official said Saturday.

The UN refugee agency has made deals with countries, including Denmark, to take in a number of refugees each year. Since 1989, Denmark has accepted about 500 such refugees every year.

But now Denmark “doesn’t want to commit ourselves,” said Integration Minister Inger Stoejberg, considered an immigration hardliner. “I don’t believe we have room for quota refugees this year.”

Stoejberg said Denmark had received about 56,000 spontaneous asylum-seekers since 2012 and many of them are expected to try to bring relatives. She said that those already in Denmark should be integrated first.

The anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, which backs the government, supports the law proposal.

Holger K. Nielsen, a senior member of the small opposition Socialist People’s Party, said it was “totally wrong of Stoejberg to close the door to quota refugees,” adding she was letting down “the weakest refugees in the world.”

No date for a vote in the 179seat

Stoejberg

Parliament was set.

Denmark received about 20,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, a small number compared with its Swedish and German neighbors.

Last year, Stoejberg said the reception of refugees through the UNHCR program had been postponed, saying Danish municipalities should have “a little breathing room to better take care of those who have already arrived.”

In Turkey, authorities say 40 Syrian migrants were stopped Friday from illegall≠≠y crossing to Greece. The migrants, among them 18 children, were stopped off the western province of Izmir.

In footage filmed from a coast guard boat, the group is seen in a rubber dinghy. As the coast guard vessel approaches, one man lifts and then briefly lowers a small child toward the sea, while another man raises his arms in prayer. The coast guard then pulls in the dinghy and transfers the migrants to its boat.

Turkey and the European Union signed a deal last year to curb the illegal flow of migrants to Greece. Turkey is host to more than 3 million Syrians who have fled the ongoing civil war in their country.

Hungary vows to fight on:

After days of fierce rhetoric, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Friday that his government “respected” an EU court’s rejection of Hungary’s challenge to a migrant relocation plan, but vowed to fight on against the measure.

“Hungary is a European Union member, so the bloc’s treaties must be respected and the court’s rulings must be acknowledged,” the populist leader said in a radio interview.

“But this is not a reason to change an immigration policy that rejects migrants,” Orban said.

“The court’s ruling does not require Hungary to do anything”, he added, because it focused only on whether the EU had the legal right to enforce refugee quotas.

The “real battle (against Brussels) is just beginning,” he added.

The European Court of Justice threw out the challenge from Hungary and Slovakia against the EU’s scheme to spread up to 160,000 Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum seekers among the 28 member states.

Brussels approved the deal in 2015 when more than one million people landed on Europe’s shores, mainly in Italy and Greece.

But recent EU figures show that just under 28,000 migrants had been relocated from Italy and Greece by September this year.

Describing immigration as “poison”, Orban has been at the forefront of a rebellion in eastern and central Europe against the quotas.

At the height of the migrant crisis, Budapest erected fences on its southern borders and recruited 3,000 “border hunter” police to patrol the frontiers.

German NGO resumes rescues:

German aid group Sea-Eye said Saturday it was resuming its migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean, a month after pulling out when Libya barred foreign vessels from a stretch of water off its coast.

“Sea-Eye has decided to resume its rescue missions in the Mediterranean which had been halted for a month,” the NGO said in a statement.

However, its two ships, the Sea-Eye and the Seefuchs, would now operate in a perimeter of 70 to 90 nautical miles from the Libyan coast, it said, “to take account of the constant threat from the Libyan coastguard and to not compromise the safety of the crews”.

Sea-Eye said its decision to return was partly prompted by events on September 2, when the Seefuchs was called on to help with a rescue mission 50 miles off Libya in which 16 people in a wooden boat were saved from drowning.

“This case shows that claims by Frontex and the EU that there are no more refugees, and therefore no more drowning people, off the Libyan coast are false.” Frontex is the EU’s border management agency. Survivors last week reported that two more vessels, rubber boats filled with migrants, had set out at the same as they did, the NGO said. Those boats and their passengers disappeared without a trace.

Migrants dropped onto Italian beaches:

The figures jumping from a small boat into the clear shallow waters and running ashore on an Italian beach look like troops practicing a D-Day-style landing, but this is no drill, and these are not soldiers.

The images, caught on camera, show what has become a increasingly common sight on the beaches of Italy’s southern islands — migrants from Africa landing in broad daylight.

“In the past these boats came at night,” said Claudio Lombardo, the local head of the Mareamico (Friend of the Sea) environmental group who filmed the scene on a beach near Agrigento in Sicily on Wednesday morning.

The change in tactic by people smugglers comes as the number of arrivals from Libya — long the busiest route for migrants from Africa trying to reach the European Union — have plummeted since departures from the coastal city of Sabratha were stopped by a shadowy armed group this summer.

As Libyan departures slumped, wooden boats from neighbouring Tunisia have started landing on secluded Sicilian beaches, often in broad daylight while tourists are out sunbathing, an official leading the investigation into the arrivals told Reuters.