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“I am proud that things have progressed so fast”
The | Reading time: 3 minutes.
The Cabinet approves the admission of 50 unaccompanied minors
In mid-April, the first 50 unaccompanied minors are brought to Germany from the Greek refugee camps. Admission is related to an agreement between EU countries to admit up to 1,600 children.
The first unaccompanied refugees from Greece will arrive in Germany on Saturday. EU Commissioner for Migration Ylva Johannson has prevailed. Questions remain about whether the children meet the criteria established by the federal government.
WThe negotiations continued for weeks. On this Saturday morning, the first 50 minor refugees from the Greek islands disembark in Hannover. Initially, he will be housed in Osnabrück as part of the youth welfare service and accompanied psychologically.
After a two-week quarantine, they will be distributed to facilities in Lower Saxony and other federal states. EU Migration Commissioner Ylva Johansson told WELT: “I am proud of how quickly things have progressed. I was in Athens on March 12 and promised that eight countries would be ready to accept unaccompanied minors from the Greek islands. ”
Johansson had been under a lot of pressure in the past few weeks. The result: Meanwhile, ten states have indicated that Greece will take around 1,600 unaccompanied minors and other refugees living “in very precarious situations,” as Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said.
His country had received the first twelve minors from Greece in the middle of this week. Germany is expected to accept a total of around 350 refugees. According to the coalition’s decision, these are “children who need treatment due to a serious illness or are unaccompanied and are under the age of 14, most of them girls.”
Selection has turned out to be more difficult in recent weeks than initially assumed, also because only a very small proportion of children living on the islands without their parents are under the age of 14 and almost no girl is among them. A second flight with minor refugees from Greece to Germany is underway on Saturday.
Johansson described the arrival of the first minor refugees in Germany and Luxembourg as “encouraging”. She announced that other countries will follow suit soon. “This is how European solidarity should work,” said the Swede. In addition to Germany and Luxembourg, France, Ireland, Finland, Portugal and Bulgaria also want to release refugee children from Greece, a member of the EU.
About 20 of the minor refugees who arrived in Germany on Saturday already have close relatives in Germany. In addition to this special admission, which is currently very media-focused, several hundred minors are transferred from Greece to Germany each year if they already have close relatives here. This is what EU law provides for. In addition, thousands of minors have traveled illegally from Greece to Germany in recent years, after Greek authorities previously brought them from the islands to the mainland.
Greece’s special admission of minors now in progress was long controversial in Germany. Union politicians in particular argued that Germany should help remedy the bad conditions for young immigrants in Greece than relocate them to Germany. However, because, despite the financial and human resources of the European Union, accommodation in the island’s camps could not be significantly improved and the danger of the new corona virus was added, supporters of a special resettlement prevailed in the end.
Johansson was pleased that refugees at risk from the Corona virus in Greece would soon receive help: “Thanks to the emergency response plan that we have implemented with the government and authorities in Greece, we are taking the sick and elderly in the camps to hotels and hotels. Apartments. 2400 people will move there in the next two weeks.
