More than 450,000 Syrians are expected to cross the Mediterranean Sea to seek refuge in Europe over the next year, UN officials announced last week. This is on top of the approximately 366,000 who have already attempted the journey this year.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has called for stronger asylum policies in Europe to deal with the rapidly growing refugee crisis. UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement that the crisis is serious, but it would be manageable if Europe were properly organised. “We are talking about four or five thousand people per day in a [European] Union that has 508 million people. We have had until now 300,000 who have crossed the Mediterranean, which is less than one per thousand of the European population.”
A single-day record was reached when 7000 Syrian refugees arrived in Macedonia on Monday 7 September.
Germany’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel told AFP news that Germany would continue to take “a greatly disproportionate share” of refugees in years to come “because we are an economically strong country”.
“[Germany] could surely deal with something in the order of half a million [refugees] for several years … I have no doubt about that, maybe more.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also given her backing to the EU quota to take 160,000 more refugees.
Merkel said the quota suggested by the EU, which involved Germany taking 31,000 extra refugees, represented the least they could do. There have been reports of Germany taking up to 800,000 this year alone.
“This joint European asylum system cannot just exist on paper but must also exist in practice — I say that because it lays out minimum standards for accommodating refugees,” Merkel said in a news conference with German Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons that they will resettle up to 20,000 refugees from Syria over the next four and a half years. Cameron said that Britain would only take in vulnerable refugees from camps in the region, and not those who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
France will begin reconnaissance flights over Syria, potentially carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS), President François Hollande announced during a press conference. Hollande blamed the IS for the refugee crisis in Europe as well as a number of terrorist attacks carried out in France and other countries.
France and Germany will ask the European Commission to introduce an “obligatory and permanent” system to deal with those fleeing war zones and force EU members to take their share of asylum seekers.
“Every country must engage … the important word is ‘obligatory’ … and permanent, meaning continuing for some time,” Hollande said.
Hollande said France would take 1000 refugees who had crossed from Hungary into Germany last week, saying that they cannot leave Germany to deal with the situation alone, and the EU needs “to show solidarity”.
He added that France would take 24,000 refugees over the next two years, as part of the EU quota.
The president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, warned that the current crisis is part of a refugee “exodus”, which will last for years.
“The wave of migration is not a one-time incident … we will have to deal with this problem for many years to come.”