An NGO is worried what will happen with the refugees.
The Welcome Initiative has warned that it can be expected that Austria will return a large number of refugees, as many as 1,700 of them, to Croatia. These are refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, reports n1info.com on July 20, 2016.
The Initiative has issued a statement warning about the way Austria and Croatia are behaving towards the refugees: “These are refugees who came to Austria via the so-called Balkan refugee route. Although the information about their return to Croatia is two weeks old, Austrian organization Interkulturelles Zentrum and the Welcome Initiative stress that there has been no official reaction to the announcement of their arrival, let alone any plan how they will be accommodated, taken care of and integrated. Croatia can refuse to accept them; however, there is a question of legitimacy and legality of such decision, but also the responsibility of Austria for such treatment.
The management of the so-called Balkan refugee route has been marked by, among other things, radical political shifts and extreme legal uncertainties. The route was established to help refugees who desperately needed security and protection to come to Germany and Austria, which were officially implementing the policy of welcome and solidarity. The passage of these people to those EU member states derogated existing EU legal mechanisms, particularly the Dublin Regulation, according to which the responsibility for the processing of applications for international protection would generally not be with those member states. The policies on the route were becoming more restrictive and were increasingly transformed into a closed door policy.
The return process will allegedly be conducted on the basis of re-establishment of the Dublin Regulation, but it is extremely doubtful whether there is any legitimacy for returning people from member state in which they have been staying for months, to Croatia, in which some of them spent only a few hours in transit. This would stop the integration process and they would again have to be introduced to a new culture, systems, rights and obligations. The further issue are the criteria for determining which people will be returned. Finally, the question is how this till influence the relations between the EU member states. The NGOs point out that it is unacceptable for states to arbitrarily decide on the application or inapplicability of certain legal mechanisms at the expense of human dignity.”
