EU, UN urge greater willingness to accept refugees

By Ayhan Simsek

BERLIN (AA) - Senior UN figures on Tuesday called for the refugee burden to be more evenly shared throughout the world.

“We cannot continue to operate in a world in which eight countries host more than half of the refugees and eight donors give well over 70 or 80 percent of the funding,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said at a news conference in Berlin.

“This has to be spread more evenly because it a phenomena, it is a problem, it is an issue that is of concern to the entire world.”

Turkey, which is hosting more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees, currently has the world's largest refugee population.

Grandi joined officials from the EU, the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration for a meeting hosted by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the refugee crisis.

Peter Sutherland, the UN special envoy for international migration, criticized EU states over their reluctance to accept more refugees.

“The Pope coming back from Istanbul brought more on his plane than 21 countries of the EU have taken from Syria,” he said about Pope Francis’s trip to the region in April. “This is a disgrace.”

He added: “Governments in the EU are playing up the nationalist card, feeding the populism of those who do not believe in the fundamental values that we have.”

EU migration chief Dimitris Avramopoulos said the events triggered by the refugee crisis had become a more serious threat to the EU than the economic and financial crisis.

“Some years ago in Europe some believed that it would be the economic crisis that would put the European project at stake,” he told journalists. “But it is not the case. It is exactly the refugee and migration crisis. What is threatening Europe right now is the rising of populism, nationalism and xenophobia.”

He pointed to developing a policy to pave the way for legal migration as the way to resolve the crisis.

“Europe will be in need of migrants in the future,” he said. “According to our studies, 10 years from now, Europe will need approximately 10 million workers and migrants. We need skilled workers.”