Fourteen persons will be transferred from Greece to Croatia.
A new group of refugees will this week move to their new homes in Croatia. According to unofficial information, 14 persons are expected to come to Croatia from Greece, and by the beginning of May they should be joined by another dozen people, reports Novi List on April 11, 2017.
In this way, the implementation of the European programme for the relocation of refugees will continue. So far, Croatia has received just 19 people, ten from Greece and nine from Italy. The programme was adopted by EU member states in the autumn of 2015 in order to improve the situation in Greece and Italy, the two countries which, due to their geographical location, were the most affected by the refugee crisis.
Although a year and a half have since passed, the plan is still being carried out very slowly. Croatia is a good example, given that, according to the formal decision of the Council of the European Union, it should have received a total of 968 refugees from Greece and Italy. But, it seems increasingly likely that this obligation will not be fulfilled.
Croatian Interior Minister Vlaho Orepić explained in late March the reasons for the delay in implementation of the plan. “We are not late with the implementation of our commitments. We have prepared all the mechanisms, but we just cannot get people to want to come in Croatia,” said Orepić.
However, there are problems in the implementation of the integration of refugees into Croatian society, which was mentioned in the report for 2016 by the ombudsperson. She mentioned, among other things, problems in the inclusion of refugees and immigrants in education system and the labour market, and as an example she quoted the enrolment in high school. “For example, although asylum seekers should be allowed to enrol in high schools, they are able to do that very rarely, since registration usually requires presentation of earlier certificates, which most of them do not have, because they did not take them while escaping from their countries.”
One other major problem is provision of healthcare. Because persons under international protection are no longer insured by the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance, treatment costs should be borne by the Ministry of Health. “In practice, this creates exceptional difficulties, because doctors do not know how to register service provided to them, which means that they do not want to admit such persons, so almost none of the persons under international protection have a primary care physician,” warned the ombudsperson in the last year’s report.
