(MENAFN- Qatar News Agency) A recently agreed European Union plan to relocate tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Italy and Greece elsewhere in the bloc will start at the end of this week, a top EU official said.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos wrote on Twitter that he would be in Italy on Friday for the first relocation of Eritrean refugees to Sweden, according to the German News Agency (dpa).
The Greek commissioner said he would also travel to the Italian island outpost of Lampedusa to visit a so-called "hotspot," a beefed-up migrant reception centre designed to register and screen all incoming boat migrants.
The EU agreed in September to relocate across the bloc 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy in order to ease pressure on the two nations. But it has also urged them to make more serious efforts in identifying incoming sea migrants.
The idea is to let people with legitimate grounds for asylum - such as refugees from war-torn Syria - stay in the EU, but to swiftly repatriate economic migrants.
Over the past two days, the Italian coast guard has coordinated the rescue of more than 2,750 migrants in the central Mediterranean, including 928 who were picked up from seven dinghies and one vessel on Tuesday.
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