The Minister of Internal Affairs today pointed out that Portugal may only have received 30 refugees so far, but is considering 90 further applications and has offered to host a "very large number" but to no avail.
Constance Urbano de Sousa was speaking at the parliamentary committee for European Affairs about the flow of refugees into the European Union and said that Portugal this week was to receive ten refugees from Greece "but the Greek authorities said they will not be coming as they have disappeared.”
"People have to register but they are not held and often continue on their original journeys," according to the Minister, adding that Portugal has not been restrictive when selecting immigrants and would have taken more by now if they had been sent.
The minister reminded the committee that the EU had agreed to take in 160,000 refugees from Italy and Greece but that, according to figures out this week, only 491 people had been processed.
The process is being held up by the Greek and Italian authorities’ screening processes of identification, taking fingerprints and doing security checks.
These operations are done in sorting centers, but "it turns out that in Greece, of the five planned centres only the one on Lesbos is working" and in Italy, "of the six centres, only three are operational."
The minister said the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, where 20,000 people already had died trying to get to Europe, 3,500 last year alone.
280,000 people had arrived in 2014 and more than one million has made it to European soil last year.
The war in Syria has displaced 4.5 million people, mostly to the neighbouring countries of Turkey where 2.5 million refugees are located.
"We have to be able to participate in the resettlement of refugees from Turkey," said Constance Urbano de Sousa who commented that "We have to prepare for the need to comply with our humanitarian duty to protect these people and give them the best conditions for integration into European societies."
The minister stressed that Portugal must be able to accommodate more refugees and did not agree with restrictive measures being adopted in some countries, such as Denmark. She sees measures to prevent people from exercising a fundamental right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as abhorrent.
Portugal’s Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) is able to process asylum cases and will strengthen staffing at points of entry by 45 inspectors.
In September last year Portugal grudgingly accepted that it will have to re-home 1,500 people fleeing from the political and religious implosion in Syria.
Later the government accepted that this amount needed to be raised to 4,754, so far only 30 have arrived but with refugee camps bursting at the seams and more coming to Europe every day Portugal could at least offer to do more.
In November last year, Luís Gouveia, the deputy director of SEF said, “The huge majority of asylum seekers coming to Europe want to get to Germany and Sweden where they have family, or where they know they can find work and have a good lifestyle. Preference is always for northern countries. The Iberian Peninsula is unknown.”
