Amid reports of Greece being at risk of losing its Schengen Area membership, Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Nikos Xydakis has revealed his dissatisfaction with the Europe Union’s response to multiple Greek requests for assistance.
“Since May Greece has persistently been asking for technical, technological and staffing help, and what it has received from Europe is far less than what was asked for,” Xydakis told the Associated Press in an interview.
Among Xydakis’s grievances are that only around 450 Frontex agents have been deployed to Greece thus far, even though the Greek government had asked for 750, as well as that fewer than requested fingerprint machines have been provided, while there is also a shortage of assistance in sea patrols.
“There is an inability of the member states and the European mechanisms to respond to the needs of this storm,” he is further quoted as saying by the AP.
The United Nations Refugee Agency reports that 894,511 refugees and migrants have been registered as arriving in Europe this calendar year. 746,714 have entered through Greece. Xydakis cites this great number of arrivals for Greece’s slight delays in complying with European directives on the refugee crisis.
European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos told Kathimerini newspaper on Wednesday that Greece must demonstrate that it is capable of protecting its own borders. In response to the media reports about a potential suspension from the Schengen Area and Avramopoulos’s comments, the Greek government had issued a statement that denied the possibility of such a suspension and insisted that Greece is taking all the necessary and feasible measures to deal with the refugee crisis.
Since Avramopoulos’s remarks, Frontex announced it will deploy agents to Greece’s border with FYROM, where FYROM is erecting a fence to curb entries and has adopted a combat zone-refugee only acceptance policy.
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