Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Eight years after facing a refugee crisis in 2015, the EU is still struggling with how to change its asylum system as migrant entries are once again on the rise.
Reaching consensus among the bloc’s twenty-seven nations has become more complicated with the far-right’s growing influence in the politics of several member countries.
The problem, kicked along the road for years, will be discussed in Thursday’s meeting of EU interior ministries, with a focus on how to expedite the process of returning undocumented migrants to their home countries in cases where their asylum bid fails.
Sweden to host EU meeting
Sweden, the current chair of the EU, will host the meeting.
Sweden is among the more generous countries in terms of giving asylum before 2015-16, has since October has a coalition government depended on a nationalist far-right party, the Sweden Democrats.
Bernd Parusel, an expert at Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, told AFP that the alliance is really stepping up the restrictive approach, introduced during the previous government in Sweden.
He said that the aim was to reduce all immigration not only asylum, and Sweden would not support any compromise or deal that would increase the number of migrants coming to Sweden to apply for asylum.
