At yesterday’s European Council summit in Brussels Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for greater solidarity from his European partners stressing that “Greece is carrying all of Europe’s burden on the refugee issue”.
The Greek PM asked for effective solidarity on the refugee issue instead of flexible or optional solidarity, adding that out of the 66,000 relocations Greece was to make to other member-states, only 5,200 have been implemented.
“We didn’t do the EU-Turkey deal to stop the flow of refugees, but to replace the illegal flows with legal flows. If some people want to seal off all flows, then this is against our common principles,” he told EU leaders.
Concerning the review of the common European asylum system, the prime minister said it is “unacceptable” because it doesn’t foresee a distribution of migrants but burdens solely the countries of first entrance, the same sources said. He also said the EU must give Turkey a clear answer about the Visa issue so as not to give Turkish President Recep Erdogan excuses to not uphold the agreement. On the Visa issue, he also said EU must not hold “double standards for Cyprus”.
