Ending refugee relocation ‘anti-european’

DIMITRIS AVRAMOPOULOS, the EU’S migration commissioner, yesterday branded plans by Donald Tusk, the European Council president, to scrap mandatory migrant relocation quotas “anti-european”, as a furious row broke out among senior figures in Brussels and Strasbourg yesterday.

Mr Tusk is expected to tell EU leaders at a Brussels summit tomorrow that the mandatory quota scheme, which envisaged relocating up to 160,000 refugees who reached Greece and Italy, has been hugely divisive, pitting the likes of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland against the rest of EU.

He was also expected to ask for the scrapping of the programme, in a move that would pile even more pressure on Greece, where 60,000 refugees have been stuck in limbo since the peak of the migration crisis of 2015.

The Greek island of Lesbos offered a glimpse of the complexities of a change to the quota system yesterday when authorities agreed to expand the chronically overcrowded camp at Moria by lifting a blockade of 50 shipping containers to house 200 of the 7,000 living in desperate conditions there.

Mr Avramopoulos, who is Greek, said in Strasbourg: “The paper prepared by Mr Tusk is unacceptable. It is anti-european and it denies, it ignores all the work we’ve done during the past two years together.”