Spain to take 1,300 refugees from war zones
Thursday, July 23, 2015 @ 5:34 PM
SPAIN has agreed to take 1,300 Syrian and Eritrean asylum-seekers out of the 40,000 who have fled to Greece and Italy, but not the quota of 4,288 requested by the European Union as part of its distribution plan among member States.
And of the existing 20,000 asylum-seekers from further countries, who have already been granted 'refugee' status allowing them to remain in Europe for a spell, Spain will take 1,449 as opposed to the 1,549 originally called for.
Spain's interior minister Jorge Fernández Díaz announced this after the recent Summit of his counterparts in the other 27 member States to debate the proposed quota system.
The European Commission had allocated a portion of the 40,000 asylum-seekers currently waiting to hear whether their applications will be accepted after entering Greece and Italy via the 'back door'.
Fernández Díaz had initially refused, saying Spain could not cope with such a high number of refugees when the country was already crippled by unemployment – even though the European Union had promised grants per head to allow member States to fund the resettlement and living costs of each migrant during their stay.
A petition on Avaaz.org amassed over 450,000 signatures calling for Spain not to block the refugee quota plan, and many signees were war-zone dwellers themselves who wrote heart-wrenching messages on the website pleading with Fernández Díaz, addressing him as 'Dear Jorge'.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com