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4 Migrants Drown in Aegean After Dinghy Capsizes Off Greek Island E.U. Offers New Immigration Plan, Hoping to Sway Reluctant Countries
(about 5 hours later)
ATHENS — The bodies of four migrants, including two children, were pulled from the Aegean Sea on Wednesday after a dinghy capsized off the coast of Lesbos, the island that has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers trying to reach Europe. BRUSSELS — The European Union authorities, seeking to balance the scale of the migration crisis with the reluctance of some countries to take in refugees, offered a series of proposals on Wednesday that would give member states more latitude while offering them 10,000 euros for each refugee they accept.
An official at the Greek Shipping Ministry said that the bodies of a young girl, a boy, a man and a woman had been recovered, and that six people had been rescued. Europe has struggled to come up with a cohesive plan to deal with the more than one million migrants who have reached Europe in the past two years, and the proposals from the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, reflect a renewed effort to impose clearer rules for both countries and migrants.
Two survivors, rescued by a Greek Navy vessel shortly before 8 a.m., said they were traveling from neighboring Turkey aboard an inflatable dinghy when it capsized on the approach to Lesbos. Four others were rescued after a Greek Coast Guard vessel and Super Puma rescue helicopter were sent to the scene. The commission proposed a common procedure for resettling refugees from camps in countries outside the bloc, like Turkey, that would give member states the option of joining together to decide the overall number of people to take in and how to spread out the refugees among those nations.
Three other people are believed to be missing, said the Shipping Ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with protocol. That represents a form of solidarity among the willing, though it is unlikely to include countries like Hungary and Slovakia that have resisted taking in more migrants, and it falls short of a mandatory system that would be applied across the European Union.
Two Greek Navy vessels; two Coast Guard ships; a vessel belonging to Frontex, the European border monitoring agency; and a rescue helicopter continued to scour the area, the official said. A separate, mandatory program to relocate asylum seekers who have entered the bloc without permission has fallen far short of expectations. Member states were unwilling to share the burden of the huge migrant influx, and just 3,000 migrants out of an intended 160,000 have been relocated.
More than a million migrants have sought to reach Europe in the past year, and hundreds have died trying to make the perilous journey to the Greek islands. Under the terms of the new proposal, which formalizes some existing, temporary measures, the voluntary system would be supported by a cash incentive to resettle migrants from camps outside the European Union. The rules need approval from European Union governments and the European Parliament before becoming law.
The number of arrivals has dropped significantly since the European Union reached an agreement with Turkey to crack down on human smuggling across the Aegean. The figure of €10,000, about $11,100, was previously available to member states that accepted refugees from outside the bloc under a temporary two-year system for 22,000 people set up last year. About 8,000 refugees have benefited from that program.
The bloc has been overhauling its asylum and migration rules in the wake of a major crisis last year, when huge numbers of migrants arrived from Africa and the Middle East. Many traveled through Turkey and crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece before settling in Germany.
The proposals were directed at both member states and migrants, with measures intended to deter those registered as asylum seekers in one state from leaving for another by specifying “clear obligations,” said Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration.
The European Union requires migrants to register for asylum in the first country they reach in the bloc. Many have been forced to register in Greece — the most popular landing point — even though they would rather go elsewhere.
Migrants who break the rules could face rapid rejection of their applications, officials at the commission said.
Jean Lambert, a British member of the European Parliament, criticized the proposed rules on asylum, saying the new duties represented “further retrograde steps in a number of areas of asylum policy” and “an obsession with punitive measures.”
The number of arrivals has dropped significantly since the European Union reached an agreement with Turkey to crack down on human smuggling across the Aegean, a short but perilous crossing.
On Wednesday, the bodies of four migrants, including two children, were pulled from the Aegean Sea after a dinghy capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesbos.
An official at the Greek Shipping Ministry said that the bodies of a girl, a boy, a man and a woman had been recovered, and that six people had been rescued near the island, which has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers trying to reach Europe. Three other people were believed to be missing.