SPAIN-POLITICS/PLENARY SESSION-MIGRANTS Former French President Sarkozy says Europe needs new policy on migration

Record ID: 134588

  • Title: SPAIN-POLITICS/PLENARY SESSION-MIGRANTS Former French President Sarkozy says Europe needs new policy on migration
  • Date: 22nd October 2015
  • Summary: MADRID, SPAIN (OCTOBER 22, 2015) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) CZECH REPUBLIC DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER, PAVEL BELOBRADEK, SAYING (WHEN ASKED ABOUT UNITED NATIONS COMMENTS OVER HIS COUNTRY'S ABUSES AGAINST IMMIGRANTS: "It is an absolute nonsense, thank you."
  • Embargoed: 6th November 2015 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Spain
  • Country: Spain
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA1AZBCN5GKAEQAGJ9V6V54L9GT
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday (October 22) that it was impossible to respond to the migrant crisis in Europe with the Schengen treaty as it stands and called for a new policy on migration.
    "Europe faces crisis of unprecedented seriousness. The current immigration crisis had never been seen before in the history of the European continent. We had never faced a problem like this and we cannot respond to such a crisis with an obsolete Schengen treaty which is falling apart," he told European leaders, heads of state and delegates at the meeting of the European People's Party in Madrid.
    The Schengen treaty enables border-free travel in the European Union.
    "We must respond to this problem with the solidarity of Europeans who propose a new Schengen. There cannot be solidarity between us without a common migratory policy in Europe. We must create that new common European policy," he said at the meeting's plenary session.
    The Czech Republic's Palek Belobradek, also attending the EPP meeting, flatly denied accusation by the U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein on Thursday that Prague was committing systematic human rights violations by detaining refugees for up to 90 days and strip-searching them for money to pay for their own detention.
    "It is an absolute nonsense," he told Reuters.
    Human rights violations "appear to be an integral part of a policy by the Czech Government designed to deter migrants and refugees from entering the country or staying there," Hussein had said in a statement.
    The Czech Republic lies to the north of the main routes taking migrants through the Balkans to Germany. It has seen only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands passing through Hungary and Austria on their flight from war or poverty.
    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has described the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Europe this year from Asia, Africa and the Middle East as an attack on the continent's Christian welfare model, said that the influx was not a refugee crisis.
    "What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters," he said.
    "Europe is not able to accept everyone who wants a better life. We have to have to help them to get back their own life with dignity, and we have to send them back to their own countries," he told the audience at the EPP.
    Orban's opponents abroad say Hungary should be more compassionate, not least because of its own history, including a 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union when Russian guns and tanks drove nearly 200,000 Hungarians to flee.
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