Czech, Slovak PMs want ‘Plan B; to protect EU on migrants

The proposal came at a meeting of European leaders on Monday which also agreed to draw up plans to allow internal border checks in Europe for up to two years, effectively suspending the Schengen zone.

Amnesty International activists hold a protest against the ongoing migrant crisis with a boat filled with mannequins wearing life vests outside the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, during an informal meeting of EU Justice and Home Affairs ministers at the Maritime Museum.

“I welcome your suggestion”, Juncker wrote to Slovenia’s Prime Minister, Miro Cerar, assuring him that the Commission supported his plan for all European Union countries to “provide assistance [to Macedonia] to support controls on the border with Greece through the secondment of police/law enforcement officers and the provision of equipment”.

The Schengen free-travel zone allows people to move around freely through 26 European countries, normally without the need for passports or border checks.

Many of those asylum seekers that try to make their way to Europe start from Turkey, a country which hosts more than two million refugees from Syria. Several EU nations have said that they could isolate Greece by closing off their borders so that incoming refugees would have to remain there.

The EU is already due to discuss the migration crisis at a summit of leaders in Brussels on February 18-19, although the issue could be overshadowed by negotiations over Britain’s EU reform demands.

European Union nations yesterday took a step toward isolating Greece amid acrimony over Athens’ failure to stem the flow of migrants at its Mediterranean island borders.

But Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said: “We are saving Schengen by applying Schengen”. For his part, Yannis Mouzalas, the Greek migration minister, protested the threat of his country’s exclusion from the Schengen agreement, characterizing such banter as playing a “blame game”.

“Greece needs to do everything as soon as possible to secure that border”, said Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner.

“We find ourselves with more internal border controls, questionable legislative procedures towards asylum seekers or refugees, less solidarity, less responsibility, and more individual and uncoordinated decisions”, he said.

Volunteers help a woman who arrived on a dinghy with other migrants and refugees from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Lesbos.

However, Greek officials fear such a plan to impose border controls would turn the country into a “black box” for refugees.

“To maintain and ensure the free movement within the Schengen zone, it is obvious that we have to better manage our external borders”, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said.

Dombrovskis said the Commission was intent on preserving Schengen, one of the EU’s key achievements, and said Greece had improved its border controls since November – but not enough.

Most migrants head to richer EU countries such as Germany, so the number entering central European states has been low.

Migrants and refugees line up to receive food as they wait to cross the border from Greece to Macedo …