Conservative New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis is poised to staunchly criticise European Council President Donald Tusk at tomorrow’s European People’s Party in Brussels, after the Council President derided the EU’s refugee burden-sharing deal among member-states.
A New Democracy statement says that Mitsotakis will express his “radical disagreement” with Tusk’s position because it violates the principles of European solidarity.
Mitsotakis will call for a just distribution of refugees with set criteria, namely the size of a country’s population and its economic capabilities.
He will also call for immediate action to protect unaccompanied minors and for a programme that will facility the reunification of refugee families.
Call for overhaul of Dublin III Regulation
Mitsotakis will call for an overhaul of the Dublin III regulation, so that those who are arrested in an EU country after having passed through Greece will not be returned to Athens.
New Democracy has laid out a number of proposals for grappling with the refugee-migrant crisis, including expediting reviews of asylum applications, which they say have delayed over the last two years.
Secondly, it proposes the quick determination of whether an individual is a refugee or a migrant, so that the latter can be returned to Turkey.
The party demands that migrants not eligible for asylum be housed in closed facilities with decent living conditions, until they are extradited.
How was 1 bn euros in EU refugee funding spent?
New Democracy is also demanding absolute transparency in the management of national and European funding earmarked for migrants.
“Over one billion euros have been disbursed by the EU, and nobody knows until now how this huge financial assistance offered to Greece has been ‘exploited’,” the party said in a statement, implying that something is awry in the government’s management of these funds.
Finally, the conservative main opposition party is demanding more effective border patrols
