COPY LINK

IMMIGRATION

Latest human wave of refugees reaches Austria

Austria was bracing for an influx of 10,000 migrants on Saturday, as Europe's increasingly divided countries stepped up efforts to push the wave of desperate humanity on to their neighbours.

Published: 19 September 2015 21:50 CEST

Latest human wave of refugees reaches Austria

Hungary floods Austria with buses as it attempts to get rid of its refugees. Photo: ATV video grab

In the latest chapter in the EU's escalating refugee crisis, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia tussled over how to cope with the massive inflow of people passing through on their way to new lives in northern and western Europe.

The European Union, meanwhile, sketched out plans to boost aid to encourage Syrians in Turkey to stay put rather than join the exodus.

Hungary's right-wing government, which has faced international criticism over violent clashes with migrants and a hastily erected fence along its frontier with Serbia, has vowed to “defend its borders” against the flood of new arrivals, most of whom are from the Middle East and Africa.

But in a shift in tactics late Friday, Hungarian authorities began transporting thousands of migrants straight to the border with Austria, an apparent bid to move them through and out of their territory as quickly as possible.

Austrian police said Hungary had bussed at least 6,700 people to the border, with a total of 10,000 arrivals expected in the Burgenland border region by the end of Saturday.

Ground-level coordination

There was no let-up in the stream of people making the gruelling journey across the Balkans into western Europe, with Croatia saying 20,700 had entered the country since Wednesday.

Zagreb, which initially said it would allow migrants to pass through freely, announced it was swamped on Friday and began transporting hundreds to the Hungarian border by bus and train — sparking a furious reaction from Budapest.

Despite the row, Croatian and Hungarian authorities appeared to be coordinating on the ground. An AFP journalist along the frontier between the two countries saw migrants board Croatian buses that took them to the border, before disembarking and crossing on foot then boarding Hungarian buses that quickly departed.

Migrants were being transported on Friday to two border crossings with Hungary and two with Slovenia, Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic said. Both countries belong to Europe's borderless Schengen zone.

Hungary's barbed wire fence grows

In a new hurdle aimed at stemming the influx, Hungary said it had completed a 41-kilometre (25-mile) barbed-wire barrier along part of its frontier with Croatia.

It “was finished overnight Friday,” defence spokesman Attila Kovacs told AFP in Budapest.

The remaining 330 km of the border runs roughly along the Drava river, which is difficult to cross.

The new barrier adds to a barbed-wire fence that Hungary completed along its frontier with Serbia earlier this week, backed with laws threatening illegal migrants with jail, which forced the migrant flow towards neighbouring Croatia.

The first migrants to have taken this diverted new route — through Croatia and Slovenia — arrived in Austria on Saturday, from where many hope to travel on to elsewhere in the European Union.

About 150 people crossed the border, local police said, and were being looked after by the Red Cross in the state of Styria.

A step behind them, on the Croatia-Slovenia frontier, aid tents have sprung up with local and foreign volunteers giving out food, water and clothes.

“It's generous of them,” said Khaddam Ghaiath, a Syrian former customs official who is on the road with his 70-year-old mother.

“It must be a shock for them to see thousands of people arriving like this. It is not a normal situation.”

Tensions boiled over at the Croatian border town of Harmica overnight, with Slovenian riot police using pepper spray against several hundred migrants, some with children, who had sought to push through their cordon into Slovenia, an AFP photographer saw.

The clash happened shortly after Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar said the small country might consider creating “corridors” for refugees wanting to reach northern Europe if they continue arriving in large numbers.

Slovenian police said on Saturday that 1,287 had arrived as of midnight Friday, of which 483 were from Afghanistan, 470 from Syria and 126 from Iraq.

German warning

Figures released Friday showed the EU received almost a quarter of a million asylum requests in the three months to June, while the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said nearly 474,000 people had so far this year braved perilous trips across the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

Italy's coastguard on Saturday said it had picked up more than 4,500 people off the Libyan coast, as calm seas sparked a flurry of attempts to make the crossing.

The continent's biggest migratory flow since the end of World War II has dug a deep rift between western and eastern EU members over how to distribute the migrants fairly.

Another worry is over the fate of the Schengen agreement, a pillar of the European integration project that allows borderless travel between member states.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, is the great magnet for the migrants, expecting up to a million asylum seekers this year.

But the country's Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Saturday that the EU should in future should take a finite number of migrants, while sending the rest back to a safe country in their home regions.

“We cannot accept all the people who are fleeing conflict zones or poverty and want to come to Europe or Germany,” Thomas de Maiziere said in an interview with news weekly Spiegel.

EU interior ministers are to meet again on Tuesday, followed by an emergency summit on Wednesday.

Turkish solution?

Meanwhile, European leaders called for more action to tackle the problem at one of its sources — Turkey, from where many of the migrants have travelled, including tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.

European Commissioner Johannes Hahn said Saturday the EU was earmarking aid of “up to one billion euros” ($1.13 billion) to encourage Syrian refugees in Turkey to stay there rather than join the outpouring of people heading to Europe.

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann and German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel meanwhile issued a joint call for United Nations countries to contribute an extra five billion euros ($5.65 billion) in aid for refugees living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan.

Of the more than four million Syrians who have fled their country, nearly half have sought shelter in Turkey, while more than a million are now living in Lebanon and at least 600,000 in Jordan.

Leaders urge aid boost

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann and German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel on Saturday called for United Nations countries to contribute an extra five billion euros ($5.65 billion) in aid for refugees living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan.

“We have to help countries where the misery is so great that people are going on the road,” Gabriel said, in reference to the tens of thousands of migrants — many of them Syrian refugees — who have headed to Europe in recent months.

“If people have nothing to eat and drink, what can they do but flee? No barrier in the world will stop them,” Gabriel told a press conference.

In a thinly veiled reference to Hungary, which has been fencing off its borders in a bid to keep the migrants out, Faymann said: “A country can build a fence and try to pass on the responsibility to provide humanitarian aid to its neighbours,” but added that “international solidarity” is needed to solve the crisis.

The United Nations estimates that Jordan is hosting 600,000 Syrian refugees, while the government puts the figure at up to 1.4 million.

Tiny Lebanon, which has a population of only four million, is currently hosting more than 1.1 million Syrians forced from their homes by their country's brutal civil war.

Berlin called last week at a meeting of G7 and Arab countries for more funds for the UN refugee agency.

Europe is facing its biggest migration crisis since World War II as it struggles to cope with a massive influx of migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The International Organization for Migration said this week that nearly 474,000 people braved perilous trips across the Mediterranean to reach Europe this year.

Europe's new EES passport checks: Your questions answered

Two big changes are coming for travel in and out of the EU and Schengen zone – EES and ETIAS.

You can find an overview HERE on what they mean, but broadly EES is an enhanced passport check at the border including biometric information while ETIAS is a visa waiver required for tourists making short visits.

Despite being scheduled to begin later this year, many aspects of how EES will actually work on the ground are still unclear – while much of the available information is for people who are travelling as tourists (rather than foreigners living in an EU or Schengen zone country).

So we asked readers of The Local to send us your questions.

Here we take a look at some of the most commonly asked questions – including the situation for dual-nationals, for non-EU citizens resident in Europe, for second-home owners and the situation at the UK-France border.

Some answers are still unclear – either because they have not yet been finalised or because the available information is not very specific. Where we have had to answer “we don’t know”, we will continue to badger the European Commission plus national and port authorities on your behalf. We will update this article when we know more.

When is this coming into effect?

Good question. Believe it or not, discussions on the Entry & Exit System began in 2011. At that time the UK was part of the EU and was reportedly enthusiastic about EES. Things changed and now the border between France and the UK – an external EU border since Brexit – is a major worry. More on that below.

Anyway, it’s been a long term project and the start dates have been postponed multiple times, first because of Covid and then because infrastructure was not ready. The most recent postponement came at the request of France, which wanted to get the Paris Olympics over with before any border changes were made.

The EU now says that the start date for EES is the “second half of 2024” – UK media have reported October 6th as a possible start date while European airports have reportedly told to be ready by November. Meanwhile the French interior ministry says that the start is envisaged “between the final part of 2024 and the beginning of 2025”.

We’ll see.

Who does it affect?

EES is aimed at non-EU travellers who are a crossing an EU/Schengen external border.

EU citizens will not have to complete EES registration.

Neither will non-EU citizens who have residency in an EU or Schengen zone country – they will need to produce proof of residency such as a residency permit or long-stay visa.

Neither will non-EU residents who have a valid short-stay visa for a country in the EU. This could include second-home owners who have obtained a short-stay (under six months) visa in order to allow them unlimited visits to their holiday home.

However citizens from countries which do not benefit from the 90-day rule and who therefore need a visa even for short visits (eg Indians) will have to complete EES registration.

It does not apply when travelling between Schengen zone countries (more on that below).

Where does it apply?

EES is about external EU/Schengen borders, so does not apply if you are travelling within the Schengen zone – eg taking the train from France to Germany or flying from Spain to Sweden.

Ireland and Cyprus, despite being in the EU, are not in the Schengen zone so will not be using EES, they will continue to stamp passports manually.

Norway, Switzerland and Iceland – countries that are in the Schengen zone but not in the EU – will be using EES.

The full list of countries using EES is: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Therefore a journey between any of the countries listed above will not be covered by EES.

However a journey in or out of any of those countries from a country not listed above will be covered by EES.

What is EES pre-registration?

You’ll soon be hearing a lot about EES “pre-registration”. EES itself is basically an enhanced passport check – travellers will need to register their biometric details (fingerprints and facial scans) to enhance the security of passport checks.

Automated passport checks will also start to calculate how long you have been in the EU, and therefore automatically detect over-stayers (eg people who have over-stayed their visa or who have over-stayed their 90-day allowance). EES does not change any of the rules regarding length of stay, it just toughens up enforcement of them.

The first time that you cross an external Schengen border you will need to register additional details including fingerprints and a facial scan, and have them electronically linked to your passport. This takes place in a special zone at the airport/port/station that is your departure point.

Once you have completed the pre-registration, you then proceed to passport scanning.

The pre-registration only needs to be done once and then lasts for three years. Those three years renew every time you cross an external border, so regular travellers shouldn’t need to renew it until they get a new passport – at which point the pre-registration must be done again.

Does pre-registration have to be done at the airport/port/station? Can’t I do it on a website or app?

Advance registration is what many travel operators, especially in the UK, are calling for. They say that getting everyone to complete pre-registration in person on site will cause chaos.

However, the EU at the moment seems to be sticking to the original idea of in-person registration. There are a number of practical problems with trying to pre-register fingerprints, but a solution could yet be found.

What can I do now?

Many of our readers want to get organised now and register their details in advance to avoid border delays. Unfortunately this is not possible and at the moment all you can do is wait until the system comes into effect. Frustrating, we know.

What about dual nationals?

People who have dual nationality of an EU and non-EU nation (eg British and Irish passports or American and Italian passports) will not be required to complete EES checks if they are travelling on their EU passport.

If, however, they are travelling on their non-EU passport they would need to complete EES registration.

EES does not change any of the rules relating to dual nationality or to travelling as a dual national – full details HERE.

What’s the situation for non-EU citizens resident in the EU/Schengen area?

The European Commission is clear about one point: EES does not apply to people who have residency in an EU country. This is because a major part of EES is catching over-stayers – which of course does not apply to people who are resident here.

What the Commission is a lot less clear about is how this will work in practice.

Most airports/port/stations have two queues: EU passports and non-EU passports. It’s not clear which queue non-EU citizens resident in the EU should use, how they can avoid automated passport checks entirely and use a manned booth (so that they can show both a passport and proof of residency) or even whether manned booths will be available at all departure points.

What if I live in the EU but I don’t have a visa/residency permit?

For most non-EU citizens, having either a visa or a residency permit is obligatory in order to be legally resident.

However, there is one exception: UK citizens who were legally resident in the EU prior to the end of the Brexit transition period and who live in one of the “declaratory” countries where getting a post-Brexit residency card was optional, rather than compulsory. Declaratory countries include Germany and Italy.

Although it is legal for people in this situation to live in those countries without a residency permit, authorities already advise people to get one in order to avoid confusion/hassle/delays at the border. Although EES does not change any rules relating to residency or travel, it seems likely that it will be more hassle to travel without a residency card than it is now.

Our advice? Things are going to be chaotic enough, getting a residency permit seems likely to save you a considerable amount of hassle.

How does this affect the 90-day rule?

Citizens of certain non-EU countries – including the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – are entitled to spend up to 90 days in every 180 in the EU without the need for a visa.

EES does not change this rule, so all the current regulations and restrictions continue to apply.

READ ALSO: How does the 90-day rule work?

What EES does change is the enforcement of the rule – at present non-EU nationals have their passports manually stamped on entry and exit, and border guards use these stamps to calculate whether people are sticking to their 90-day allowance.

It’s a bit of a hit-and-miss system, passports don’t always get stamped when they should, sometimes border guards misread the stamps and sometimes passports get stamped in error. EES should solve all of these problems by using an electronic scan of the passport and automatically calculating the 90-day allowance.

It will make it much harder for people to over-stay (indeed, this is one of its stated aims) but for people sticking to the rules it should actually be easier and more efficient. Should. If it works as advertised, that is…

What’s the deal for second-home owners?

For non-EU citizens who own property in the EU, it all depends on whether they have a visa or limit their visits to 90 days in every 180, as described above.

People who use the 90-day allowance will be subject to EES and use the system in the same way as short-stay tourists.

People who have a visa are exempt and need to show their visa at the border. As described in the “non-EU residents in the EU” section, however, it’s far from clear how this will actually work in practice at the border.

Why is the UK-France border such a problem?

As discussed above, EES will apply to all EU/Schengen external borders, but the biggest fears so far are about the UK-France border.

So is this just the Brits whining about the easily foreseeable consequences of Brexit? Actually no, there are genuine reasons why this border is likely to be a problem, mostly relating to volume of traffic and infrastructure.

Although it is true that EES wouldn’t have affected the UK-France border if it hadn’t been for Brexit, the current reasons for the worries are more practical.

Put simply, the UK-France border is one of the busiest EU external borders that there is, with around 60 million people crossing per year. Of those travellers, around 70 percent are UK citizens, meaning they will have to complete EES formalities.

Add to that the limitations of space: several UK destination points, including the Port of Dover and Eurostar’s London St Pancras terminal, are already in cramped areas with very little expansion room, meaning that creating the new infrastructure to deal with EES checks is very difficult.

For context, the newly completed EES pre-registration area at Coquelles (Calais) covers 7,000 square metres, in order to accommodate up to 60 passenger vehicles simultaneously.

The final factor is the Le Touquet agreement – the 2003 bilateral agreement between France and the UK means that passport checks for people entering France are done on UK soil, and vice versa. This creates a unique situation where people travelling from Eurostar Gare du Nord or St Pancras, the ports of Dover or Calais or the Channel Tunnel terminals of Folkestone and Coquelles go through two sets of passport checks on departure, and none on arrival.

READ ALSO: What is the Le Touquet agreement?

The double passport checks mean that delays at one area can have severe knock-on effects.

Since Brexit, the Port of Dover has reported long delays at several peak times such as the start of the school holidays while Eurostar has been forced to cut the number of trains it runs per day.

EES implementation problems won’t be limited to the UK-France border, but the volume of people crossing the border means that even slight delays to one system can easily lead to hours-long queues.

What about Nato staff or people with diplomatic passports?

People who have a special status such as diplomatic passports will not have to complete pre-registration. However, as with other exempt groups such as non-EU residents of the EU or visa holders, it is unclear how this will actually work on the ground and which passport queue they should join.

Will I need an extra visa to enter the EU as a tourist?

EES does not change anything with regards to visas – in essence all the current visa rules stay the same, only the enforcement changes.

However there is another change coming down the track – ETIAS, which will affect non-EU citizens entering the EU as tourists or visitors.

You can find an overview of how it works HERE, but one thing we do know is that it won’t be introduced until after EES is up and running and (hopefully) most of the problems ironed out.

One unholy mess at a time.

Will it really be an unholy mess?

The European Commission says: “The main advantage of the EES is saving time. The EES replaces passport stamping and automates border control procedures, making travelling to European countries using the EES more efficient for the traveller.”

Hmm.

As outlined above, there could be infrastructure problems at several departure points, there is as yet little clarity on certain import details and of course all new systems take time to bed in.

After the first year of operation things are likely to get smoother – by this time most regular travellers will have already completed the pre-registration and will therefore by able to move straight into getting their passport scanned, leaving only new travellers to complete the pre-registration formalities.

That first year, however, looks like it could be a little chaotic at certain borders, especially the UK-France one, at peak travel times such as the start of school holidays.

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!