Tag Archives: Austria

Austria takes another baby step towards tougher asylum rules

Migrants wait to cross the border from Slovenia into Spielfeld in Austria, F

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria has taken its next step, albeit small, toward introducing tougher rules on immigration that will allow it to turn away asylum seekers at its borders within an hour and also to cap the number of asylum requests it accepts.

The government said on Tuesday it would start next week to collect expert opinions needed to pass an emergency decree necessary to trigger implementation of the new rules.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka wants the emergency decree to be introduced as soon as possible rather than when an agreed yearly cap of 37,500 is reached.

But Chancellory Minister Thomas Drozda said on Tuesday that debating the matter and procedural issues would take at least until late October.

He also said that turning away migrants at the border might be complicated by the fact Austria has not yet agreed on a deportation arrangement with its eastern neighbor Hungary and many other relevant countries.

“It’s a question of whether one wants to or should prepare now for a situation that will possibly occur in November or December,” Drozda told reporters.

Chancellor Christian Kern has not pushed for the implementation of the tougher rules on asylum claims yet and has said he saw little point in starting to do so if this year’s limit would only be reached around late November.

Austria has mostly served as a conduit into Germany for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa but the country of 8.5 million people has also taken in about 110,000 asylum seekers since last summer.

After initially welcoming refugees, the government decided to cap the number of asylum claims it would accept this year and has made family reunification harder for migrants, steps widely criticized by EU states and human rights groups.

Drozda said the number of asylum requests had reached 24,260 at the end of July with requests coming in at a much slower pace than last year.

Austria led efforts that resulted in the closing of the so-called Balkan route from Turkey to northern Europe and is turning away an increasing number of migrants at its southern border with Italy.

Also on Tuesday, the Danish government proposed the adoption of a law that would enable police to reject asylum seekers at the borders in times of crisis such as that in 2015 when thousands of migrants sought to enter the country.

(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Nearly 90,000 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in EU in 2015

Two children gather poppies at a field next to a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Some 88,300 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in the European Union in 2015, 13 percent of them children younger than 14, crossing continents without their parents to seek a place of safety, EU data showed on Monday.

More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa reached Europe last year. While that was roughly double the 2014 figure, the number of unaccompanied minors quadrupled, statistics agency Eurostat said.

Minors made up about a third of the 1.26 million first-time asylum applications filed in the EU last year.

European Union states disagree on how to handle Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War Two and anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, even in countries that traditionally have a generous approach to helping people seeking refuge.

Four in 10 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in Sweden, where some have called for greater checks, suspicious that adults are passing themselves off as children in order to secure protection they might otherwise be denied.

Eurostat’s figures refer specifically to asylum applicants “considered to be unaccompanied minors”, meaning EU states accepted the youngsters’ declared age or established it themselves through age assessment procedures.

More than 90 percent of the minors traveling without a parent or guardian were boys and more than half of them were between 16 and 17 years old. Half were Afghans and the second largest group were Syrians, at 16 percent of the total.

After Sweden, Germany, Hungary and Austria followed as the main destinations for unaccompanied underage asylum seekers.

Seeking to stem the influx of people, the EU has struck a deal with Turkey to stop people crossing from there into the bloc. Turkey hosts some 2.7 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Syria.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Number of anti-Semitic incidents in Austria rises strongly

Pupils of the Lauder Chabad school

VIENNA (Reuters) – The number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in Austria increased more than 80 percent last year, with reported internet postings denouncing Jews more than doubling, an Austrian group said on Wednesday.

Jews across Europe have warned of a rising tide of anti-Semitism, fueled by anger at Israeli policy in the Middle East, while far-right movements have gained popularity because of tensions over immigration and concerns following militant Islamist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

The Austrian Forum Against Anti-Semitism, which began monitoring anti-Semitic incidents in 2003, said 465 incidents were recorded during 2015, over 200 of them being internet postings hostile to Jews.

The total number of internet postings reported to Austria’s constitutional protection authority as offensive remained stable in 2015, but the number of postings liable to be used in criminal proceedings doubled compared to 2014, according to an interior ministry spokesman.

“The whole picture is terrifying,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Communities of Austria (IKG), said.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) urged the European Union and its member states in January to increase efforts to combat widespread anti-Semitic cyber hate, arguing that anti-Semitism in the region did not show any sign of waning.

IKG’s Secretary General Raimund Fastenbauer said it was difficult to clearly tell who committed some anti-Semitic acts because offenders could not be identified and internet postings were usually anonymous.

But there was a clear trend of increasingly hostile behavior against the 15,000 Jews living in Austria from Muslims, the Jewish community representative said.

“There is an increasing concern in our community that – if the proportion of Muslims in Austria continues to rise due to immigration, due to the refugees – this could become problematic for us,” Fastenbauer said.

Austria has mainly served as a conduit into Germany for refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa but has absorbed a similar number of asylum seekers relative to its much smaller population of 8.7 million.

(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Austria takes migrant fingerprints on the border, then discards them

SPIELFELD, Austria/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – On the Austrian-Slovenia border, one of the last stops on the migrant route to Germany, a policeman explains that after his 12-hour shift taking new arrivals’ fingerprints, most are lost minutes after they are taken.

“We are not allowed to save the fingerprints,” the Austrian policeman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said as he sat in a tent at the Spielfeld border crossing. “We do what we’re asked to do.”

Austria, which saw 700,000 migrants crossing its borders last year, says it is not legally allowed to save and share with other European states more than 90 percent of the fingerprint data it takes of migrants fleeing war and poverty, a potential security problem at a major migrant hub.

It is only required to upload onto Europe’s shared fingerprint database, Eurodac, the data of those who actually apply for asylum in the country, which is less than 10 percent of those crossing into Austria.

So Austria takes digital fingerprints of everyone entering the country, checks whether they have a criminal record, but does not save the data if they want to move on to Germany, which most do.

Roz, a 28-year old Syrian mother of two, is surprised to hear that her family’s fingerprints are neither saved nor shared.

“They need to know who we are. If you record fingerprints of refugees, it guarantees security in this country,” she said as she was shown by Austrian officials onto a bus that would take her to the German border, her chosen destination.

ANACHRONISM

The situation highlights how European laws are far behind the challenges of the continent’s latest crisis, one that has already seen hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, mainly from Syria, flooding into the continent seeking a new life.

“That is a major problem, we have no records on these people, there are so many moving around the bloc and we have no trace of them whatsoever,” said one diplomat in Brussels, adding that some EU countries have tried to push for changes but they were blocked due to privacy protection concerns.

Berndt Koerner, deputy executive director of Europe’s border agency Frontex, said he was confronted with an “anachronism” in the sharing of migrant data.

“We are currently confronted with the problem that we cannot access certain databases, which can be used nationally in border controls,” Koerner told reporters this month.

The system was not changed even after the evident security problems in tracing the movements of the surviving Islamist militants involved in the Paris attacks last November.

Only states on the EU’s external borders, such as Greece and Italy, must save and share all fingerprint data.

Still, at a West Balkans summit in October all participants, including Austria, committed to registering, fingerprinting and uploading onto Eurodac all migrant data even on borders in the no-visa and border-control free Schengen zone.

Croatia and Finland, for example, save fingerprints of all migrants who arrive there, while Germany only lets in migrants who state they want to apply for asylum there.

Austria’s coalition of the social-democrat SPO and Christian-conservative OVP has come under pressure in opinion polls from their right-wing, anti-Islam Freedom Party rivals since the latest migrant wave arrived last autumn.

Drawing ire from Brussels and accusations it was breaking EU law, Vienna this month introduced daily caps on how many entries it allows across its southern borders and the number of asylum requests it will accept.

But even as the coalition seems to attempt to coax back voters worried about migration, the two parties publicly blame one another for failing to create the legal grounds to save the fingerprints as talks began on how to amend the border law.

(Additional reporting by Francois Murphy, Igor Ilic, Tuomas Forsell, Tina Bellon Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Austria sticks to migration cap despite EU legal warning

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Austria said on Thursday it would go ahead with introducing daily caps on migrants despite warnings from Brussels that the move broke European Union rules, which have already been badly stretched by the migration crisis engulfing the bloc.

Vienna announced it would let in no more than 3,200 people and cap asylum claims at 80 per day from Friday as it tries to cut immigration, drawing criticism from the European Union’s migration chief.

“Politically I say we’ll stick with it … it is unthinkable for Austria to take on the asylum seekers for the whole of Europe,” Austria’s Chancellor Werner Faymann said on arriving at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

Around 700,000 migrants entered Austria last year and about 90,000 applied for asylum in the country sitting on the migrant route from Turkey via Greece and the Balkans to Germany.

“After 100,000 refugees, we can’t tell the Austrian people that it will just continue like this. That’s why I tell the EU: we set a good example but to think that you don’t have to do anything, then I have to say it is time for the EU to act,” Faymann said.

Austria is the latest EU state to resort to its own measures to curb migration and try control the flows as the 28-nation bloc has all but failed to implement a joint response to its worst migration crisis in decades.

“It is true that Austria is under huge pressure,” European Union Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told Reuters earlier on Thursday. “It is true they are overwhelmed. But, on the other hand, there are some principles and laws that all countries must respect and apply.”

Avramopoulos sent a letter to Austria’s Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner on Thursday, urging Vienna to reconsider the move as it was against EU laws.

“The Austrians are obliged to accept asylum applications without putting a cap,” Avramopoulos said.

But Faymann blamed the failure of the European migration and refugee policies, saying the bloc’s relocation plan to ease the burden on most-affected countries was not working and criticizing central-eastern EU members who have stalled it.

The migration crisis, which saw more than a million people reach Europe last year, opened deep rifts between EU states, which are trading blame and increasingly resorting to ad-hoc national solutions despite Brussels calls to prevent them.

Faymann backed Merkel in pushing for more cooperation with Turkey to get Ankara to curb the number of migrants and refugees who embark from its shores toward Europe.

Germany and Austria are among 11 EU states that were due to meet Turkey separately before the summit of all 28 EU leaders to discuss taking in more people directly from Turkey to discourage perilous journeys across the Mediterranean.

“Every agreement between Turkey and Greece to protect the common border and make legal immigration possible, every advance and may it be ever so mediocre, would be necessary and right,” Faymann said, adding he would seek a new meeting with Turkey after the Thursday one was canceled over a bombing in Ankara.

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Austria to slash asylum claims, strengthen border checks

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria declared on Wednesday it would cap the number of people allowed to claim asylum this year at less than half last year’s total, and its chancellor said border controls would have to be stepped up “massively”- but how that would be done was unclear.

Germany said on Wednesday Austria’s decision was “not helpful” to German efforts to negotiate a European Union-wide solution with the support of Turkey, from which most migrants reach the European continent.

Hundreds of thousands of people have streamed into Austria, a small Alpine republic of 8.5 million since September, when it and Germany threw open their borders to a wave of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The vast majority of arrivals simply crossed the country on their way to Germany, but a fraction have stayed. Roughly 90,000 people, or more than 1 percent of Austria’s population, applied for asylum last year.

Public fears about immigration have fueled support for the far right, and calls for a ceiling on the number of migrants by members of the centre-right People’s Party within the coalition government have grown.

“We cannot take in all asylum seekers in Austria, or in Germany or in Sweden,” Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat who has resisted calls to cap immigration, told a joint news conference, referring to the countries that have taken in the most migrants.

The government plan announced on Wednesday provides for the number of asylum claims to be restricted to 1.5 percent of Austria’s population, spread over the next four years.

Breaking down the four-year cap, the statement said the number of asylum claims would be limited to 37,500 this year, falling annually to 25,000 in 2019.

Asked what would happen if the number of people who wanted to apply for asylum exceeded that figure, Faymann said only that experts were due to examine the issue.

“We must also step up controls at our borders massively,” Faymann told the joint news conference with Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner and other officials, without explaining what that would involve.

Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said one option would be to accept asylum requests without processing them.

“The (other) option of not having to accept asylum requests at the Austrian border is now being checked, and to send these people back, to deport them back to our safe neighbor states,” she told public broadcaster ORF.

Slovenian police said later on Wednesday that Slovenia planned “the same action” as Austria on its southern border with Croatia if Austria, which lies north of Slovenia, took further steps to limit the inflow of migrants.

The Dutch prime minister, whose government currently chairs EU ministerial councils, said Austria’s move illustrated the kind of national action likely to multiply if the 28-nation EU did not start implementing a commonly agreed strategy on asylum before a likely “spike” in arrivals with spring weather.

Saying the EU had six to eight weeks to end division and inaction on managing immigration, Mark Rutte told reporters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that if that failed “we have to think about a plan B”.

As Germany has firmed up border controls in recent months, Austria has often followed. Austria’s interior minister said last week it would start turning away people who were no longer being let into Germany, prompting a knock-on effect further down the main route into Europe.

Faymann said he had discussed his government’s plans in principle with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their Slovenian counterpart.

Faymann referred to the measures as a second-best option while awaiting a European solution involving securing the EU’s external borders, setting up centers there for people to apply for asylum, and spreading them around the bloc.

(Additional reporting by Matt Robinson in Belgrade, Marja Novak in Ljubljana and by the Brussels bureau; Editing by Mark Heinrich)