France To Help Stretched Greece By Taking 400 Refugees

Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Dec, 2019 ) :France will help Greece tackle an ongoing migration challenge that has put overwhelming pressure on its infrastructure by accepting 400 asylum-seekers, the French interior ministry confirmed on Thursday.

"We offered to relocate 400 refugees to France," the ministry told AFP, adding that they would arrive "in the coming months".

Greece in 2019 again became the main entry into Europe for migrants and refugees. The UN refugee agency recorded more than 55,000 arrivals by sea, and more than 14,000 via the land border with Turkey.

The French offer marks the first significant relocation of asylum-seekers from Greece since the height of the migration crisis in 2015.

At the time, a European Union scheme had been put in place to share out 160,000 asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece among other EU states over a two-year period.

But in the face of strong opposition from sceptical eastern EU states including Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the initiative fizzled out after just 29,000 relocations, including around 2,700 accepted by France.

Greece's new conservative government has struggled to manage the hundreds of new asylum-seeker arrivals on a daily basis from the coast of neighbouring Turkey.

The country's migrant camps are mostly full beyond capacity, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last month admitted that he had failed to persuade EU peers to accept even unaccompanied minors.

France's interior ministry said Paris was moved to help Greece "at a time when (migrant) flows are falling elsewhere" in Europe.

"We cannot leave Greece without assistance in the midst of a humanitarian challenge," France's ambassador to Greece Patrick Maisonnave told the Athens news Agency, noting that Turkey has "repeatedly threatened" to send more asylum-seekers to Europe.