Greece appeals for EU border guards, migrant aid

Though EU officials insisted publicly there was “no threat to expel” Greece from Schengen – a fairly symbolic punishment as it has no land border with the rest of the bloc – diplomats said Athens was under huge pressure to show by Friday’s meeting that it was cooperating on EU migration measures.

The UN refugee agency says some 895,000 migrants have landed on Europe’s shores so far this year, with over 3,500 dying in the water.

The European Union has offered far lower than is required to assist Greece deal with the huge inflow of refugees & different migrants this yr, the country’s European affairs minister stated Fri.Nikos Xydakis gave the instance of employees from the European border agency Frontex, saying in that Greece needed 750 still initially received exclusively 350, increasing by an extra 100 or so in current days.

A migrant has been electrocuted at the Greek-Macedonian border during a second successive day of clashes between police and migrants stranded for weeks on the Greek side.

Refugees trying to cross into Macedonia, in front of Greek police, at the northern Greek border station of Idomeni, Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. Earlier Friday, some of them threw stones at Greek riot police, who have been struggling to maintain order for the past two days.

The victim was among some 3,000 people, mostly from Pakistan, Iran and Morocco, stuck near the northern Greek town of Idomeni, demanding to cross into non-EU Macedonia and then on to northern Europe.

With Macedonian authorities only permitting passage to refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, other migrants have been sleeping inside railway carriages.

“This would mean the collapse of Schengen of Europe”, said Ioannis Mouzalas, the Greek minister for migration. But Greece’s neighbors could reintroduce border controls for Greek people if the country were deemed to be “seriously neglecting its obligations”.

Yet no one has yet boarded a train chartered in Idomeni to bring them back to the capital, witnesses and the IOM said. “Obviously, (the solution) will not be a stroll in the woods… nobody likes to see the use of violence or anything else”.

The agency says it now has 195 officers on the Aegean islands. Unable to cope with the torrent of people flowing in this year, countries north of Greece have erected razor-wire fences and reintroduced border controls, casting doubts about the viability of Europe’s 26-nation passport-free Schengen travel zone. The government has spent some €1bn on managing the crisis, it says.

“We are seeing, obviously, a number of countries who are taking much more restrictive border regimes and it may well be examined at this point”, Ms Fitzgerald said. “The chancellor and other members of the German government have repeatedly noted how noteworthy freedom of movement under Schengen is to us, and in that the possibility of preserving this, which we want, depends very directly on how we as Europeans are able to protect and effectively control our exterior borders”, Seibert stated.