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Vienna – Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is pushing for return hubs for migrants who do not leave the EU despite being denied.
“It will reduce the very willingness to seek asylum at all,” he tells TT in Vienna.
Ulf Kristersson is in Austria to discuss migration with the country’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer.
The Swedish government has previously supported the request to create return hubs, a type of center outside the EU to which migrants who have been denied asylum should be sent while awaiting deportation.
“It’s a way to say we do not accept that there is no difference between a denial and a yes. It will also reduce the incentives if you know that you have a very small chance,” says Kristersson.
Today, only about 20 percent of the migrants who have not been granted asylum in the EU actually leave the union, according to the EU.
“These are very high numbers. It undermines the whole system because it means in practice that the asylum process has no significance, instead you stay and go underground and then it creates completely different issues,” says the Prime Minister.
“If the rules we have used so far are not enough, then we must change those rules.”
He says that a proposal from the new migration commissioner may be on the table in March.
(January 2)