Schengen at risk: EU has 'no more than 2 months'

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European Council President Donald Tusk. © Vincent Kessler / Reuters
Schengen at risk: EU has 'no more than 2 months' to get refugee crisis under control, Tusk warns
Published time: 19 Jan, 2016 17:07 Edited time: 19 Jan, 2016 18:49
https://www.rt.com/news/329467-eu-refugee-schengen-risk/

  "The president of the European Council has warned that Europe has "no
   more than two months" to get the refugee crisis under control, or else
   its borderless Schengen zone will collapse.
   
   "We have no more than two months to get things under control," Donald
   Tusk told the European Parliament on Tuesday, adding that the Schengen
   area would otherwise fail. The 26-nation Schengen zone allows people to
   travel freely between participating countries, without passport or ID
   checks.
   
   Tusk also said the EU would "fail as a political project" if the bloc
   could not exercise proper control of its external borders.
   
   It comes just days after Austria's chancellor, Werner Faymann,
   announced that the country had "temporarily cancelled" its adherence to
   the Schengen agreement.
   
   "If the EU does not manage to secure the external borders, Schengen as
   a whole is put into question...then each country must control its
   national borders," Faymann told Oesterreich newpaper, adding that if
   the bloc's external borders are not secured in the near future, "the
   whole EU [will be] in question."
   
   Serbia is against the cessation of the free-movement Schengen
   Agreement, Serbian FM Ivica Dacic said on Tuesday. The sealing of the
   free-movement Schengen zone will have a domino-effect on all of the
   Balkans he said, adding that Serbia's stance towards refugees has been
   more by-the-book than that of any other EU state, RIA Novosti reported.
   
   Austria has radically changed its policy towards refugees, implementing
   a strict monitoring system for asylum seekers. A valid identity card
   will now have to be provided to authorities, and those who do not have
   the right to asylum or have already been rejected by Germany will be
   denied entry. The army has been deployed at the borders to stop
   refugees who intend to simply transit through the country and not apply
   for asylum there. Those found to be economic migrants, rather than
   refugees fleeing war and persecution, will be sent back to their
   countries of origin.
   
   In addition to Austria, 10 other countries – Greece, Bulgaria,
   Macedonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Finland, and
   Germany – have implemented some form of border control amid the refugee
   crisis.
   
   Faymann's comments came just two days after European Commission
   President Jean-Claude Juncker accused the EU of "failing to deliver" on
   efforts to resolve the refugee crisis.
   
   

   
   Despite a European Union plan to relocate 160,000 refugees from the
   frontline countries of Italy and Greece, AFP reported earlier this
   month that just 272 people had actually been moved. The decision to
   relocate asylum seekers was approved in October, despite opposition
   from several Eastern European states.
   
   Refusing to give up on the relocation scheme, Juncker warned last week
   that the EU is "moving toward a serious crisis in terms of
   credibility," and urged member states to fulfill their legal and
   political responsibilities.
   
   Europe is continuing to face the worst refugee crisis since World War
   II, with the amount of asylum seekers from the Middle East and North
   Africa expected to increase this year.
   
   According to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), the number of
   refugees entering Europe in the first 10 days of 2016 was already three
   times higher than the level in all of January 2015. Forty-nine people
   have died or gone missing after attempting to cross into Europe this
   month.
   
   More than one million refugees arrived in the European Union last year.
   Most of the asylum seekers hail from Syria, where a civil war has
   claimed the lives of 250,000 people and displaced 12 million others
   since 2011, according to UN figures."