EU to move 30,000 migrants from Greece by 2017 end

Children play in a municipality-run camp housing migrants and refugees in the city of Chios, on the Greek Aegean island of Chios. (Photo: AFP)

The EU said on Wednesday it hoped to relocate 30,000 refugees from Greece by the end of next year, insisting it was making “significant progress” on tackling the migrant crisis.

A deal with Turkey to cut the flow of migrants to the Greek islands is also proving successful, said an assessment by the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation bloc.

But despite their hopes for refugees in Greece, European Union nations look set to fall well short of their overall plan agreed a year ago to share 160,000 migrants around the bloc. “We have come a long way,” migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said as he released reports on several key areas of the crisis. “We have made significant progress as a union but we have more work ahead of us.”

Europe has faced its biggest migration crisis since World War II with well over one million refugees and migrants arriving on its shores in the past year as they flee war in Syria and the Middle East, and poverty in Africa. In September 2015 the EU agreed controversial mandatory quotas to relocate 160,000 people from overwhelmed Greece and Italy, the two countries most heavily affected by the crisis, to other countries.

Hungary is having a referendum on whether to accept the quotas, which have angered several eastern and central European states, even as Germany has taken in a million asylum seekers. The European Commission insisted there had been “important progress” despi-te so far only 5,651 refugees having been moved from Greece and Italy.