EU States Ask Commission to Fund Border Barriers
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Interior ministers from 12 out of the 27 EU states ask the European Commission to fund border barriers to stop migrants.
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Ylva Johansson, European Commissioner-designate in 2019 (EP)
12 out of the 27 EU states, including Austria, Greece, Poland, and Hungary, have asked the European Commission to pay for border barriers to stop illegal migrants entering EU states.
The officials from the 12 states argued the move was needed as part of reforms aimed at countering efforts by neighboring countries to weaponize migration. "The EU needs to adapt the existing legal framework to the new realities, enabling us to adequately address attempts of instrumentalization of illegal migration for political purposes and other hybrid threats," they wrote to the European Commission.
Commissioner Ylva Johansson said Friday she did not support the use of EU funds for member states to build barriers to protect the bloc's external borders.
Johansson agreed that more had to be done regarding the security of the external borders. Although she said she had nothing against member states opting to build fences, she asserted that the use of EU funds to finance these projects was a bad idea.
"We have a lot of things on the table that need to be adopted and need to be implemented to protect our external borders before we present anything new," Johansson said.
So far, the European Commission shied away from funding border walls for members states, insisting that the current legal framework only allows it to use EU budget funds for "border management systems."
Thousands of migrants have been crossing the borders between Belarus and the EU bloc, namely Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, during the past few months.
Lithuania and the EU accuse Belarus of sending migrants from the Middle East and Africa in retaliation for EU sanctions.
Warsaw and Vilnius started construction on a barb-wired fence on the border they share with Belarus. Hungary built such barriers on the borders of Serbia and Croatia. Slovenia followed the same path as Hungary with Croatia.
