French PM rejects EU refugee quota initiative
Baku, May 20, AZERTAC
France has joined a list of nations opposing the latest EU initiative on tackling the immigration crisis in Europe by issuing strict quotas to member states for accepting refugees over the next two years, according to Russia Today.
“I am against the introduction of quotas for migrants. This has never been in line with French proposals,” the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, said in regards to the European Commission Plan unveiled Wednesday to grant 20,000 asylums across the EU in the coming years.
“Asylum is a right granted by international standards applied to all countries of the European Union. It is also for this reason that the number of beneficiaries cannot be the subjected to quotas,” Valls said in Menton, on the Italian border, where French police in the last four days detained a record 944 migrants and arrested 54 people smugglers.
Valls called for a fair distribution of refugees between all member states, but pointed out that currently 75 per cent of migrants are settled in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
France, Valls said, has already done plenty, offering asylum to 5,000 Iraqis and 4,500 Syrian refugees since 2012.
Meanwhile he said that migrants should be expelled unless they have a genuine cause to fear reprisal at home, as he called for an EU-wide system of border guards and more “preventative measures” in the migrants’ countries of origin.
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