Austria plans to further tighten its asylum policy from May. After the recent Balkans route shut-down, Vienna believes refugees will soon focus on its Brenner alpine pass. Applications are to be processed within hours.
Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said Wednesday Austria would only approve asylum applications from refugees "we have to" accept, such as persons whose safety was threatened in a neighboring transit country.
Approval was also likely for refugees who already had close family members living in Austria, she added, referring to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights on protection of family life.
Parliamentary clearance for the new legal framework was expected by May, she said.
Entry will be limited further, says Mikl-LeitnerImage: picture-alliance/dpa/H.Fohringer
Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil said migrants would only be able to file applications at border crossings and no longer inside Austria.
The ministers were reacting to a legal appraisal sought by the government in which advisors said Austria's upper limit of 37,500 arrivals a year diverged from European norms and still required the upholding of minimum standards on handling asylum-seekers.
From mid-May, requests for asylum would still be assessed individually but within hours, Doskozil and Mikl-Leitner said, adding that those not accepted would be turned away immediately.
In January, Austria defied other EU states by setting its limit this year at 37,500 - less than half of last year's 90,000.
Mikl-Leitner said Austria had received 14,000 claims so far in 2016.
No let-up, says Mikl-Leitner
"There are no grounds to give the all-clear," she said, referring to refugees stuck in Greece and forecasts that hundreds of thousands of migrants could soon resort to transits through Italy to reach western European nations such as Germany.
Italy said its coast guard and navy rescued 1,361 migrants from boats and rubber dinghies in the southern Mediterranean on Wednesday as migrant flows from northern Africa picked up.
Tailbacks at Brenner?
In mid-March, Tirol's governor Günther Platter told Austrian ORF public radio that Europe's transport industry should expect delays if controls were re-introduced at the Brenner - one of Europe's major road links - from mid-April.
"In the end, if there are controls, there will be traffic jams," Platter said, referring to the Brenner which lies on his state's segment of the Austrian-Italian alpine border.
In recent months, migrants have been crossing the Brenner Pass only in small numbers.
Via Italy refugees also reach the Brenner PassImage: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Groder
Doskozil said he expected controls on the Brenner similar to those already in place at Austria's Spielfeld border crossing with Slovenia.
Tirol racing to find accommodation
Last week, the Tiroler Tageszeitung (TT) newspaper reported that among Tirol's 279 local authorities, 150 had not yet offered accommodation for refugees.
Tirol had provided accommodation for 6,300 refugees so far, but its state-wide TSD social welfare service was looking urgently for lodgings for a further 1,000, said the TT.
Tirol, with its regional capital Innsbruck, is Austria's third largest federal state, and has a population of 739,000.
More than one million refugees entered Europe last year, most of them making hazardous boat crossings from Turkey into Greece via Aegean Sea islands.
ipj/rc (AP, dpa)
Helping out on Lesbos
DW correspondent Gemima Harvey spent a month on the Greek island of Lesbos as a volunteer helping out desperate refugees in desperate conditions.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Left in the lurch
The effects of the new EU-Turkey deal are already being felt on Lesbos. On the weekend of March 20, NGOs were expelled from the Moria registration site, which is destined to become a closed detention center. UNHCR spokesperson Boris Cheshirkov said, "The detention of refugees would not comply with international standards and the UNHCR is in principle opposed to closed facilities."
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Routine for locals
Pulling people from the sea has become routine for Lesbos locals. Elefteria Vamvoukou runs the thermal baths at Eftalou and has baby bottles and nappies ready for the refugees arriving from across the Aegean Sea. "Tiny, tiny babies come with their mothers in the boats," she told DW. "We know what it’s like for these people because our parents or grandparents came to Lesbos as refugees in 1922."
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Proud to help
Syrian refugees Nidal and Birhip arrived by boat early one morning at Skala Sikaminias, a small fishing village in the north of Lesbos. On the perilous crossing from Turkey, they were packed in with more than 50 other people. Volunteers like Shino and Gus are eager to help these resilient men. Gus shows off his new tattoo - a family fleeing with "welcome" written in both Arabic and Farsi.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Who's that girl?
I’ll often wonder but never know whose foot fit into that small sock that was washed up on the shoreline. Did it belong to the little girl in Moria who gave me a picture of a cat? Or the girl wearing shoes five sizes too big? Or the toddler whose mother was motioning for milk formula? Or was this child swallowed by the sea? A girl from Syria who died in search of peace?
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Emotional rescue
Nidal and his daughter Nor warm themselves by the fire at the Lighthouse camp. Nidal has two sons in Germany, one in Sweden and one in Syria. He shows me photos of his grandchildren still in Syria and is overcome with emotion, handing me his phone while he wipes away his tears.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
On dry land
Lisa Tran from Germany tidies the women and children’s clothing tent at the Lighthouse camp after the morning’s arrivals have all been provided with dry clothing. Since the Greek Coastguard and Frontex started intercepting boats and bringing them to the harbors, fewer have been landing on the shorelines.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Providing small comforts
"A handful of cloves, one cinnamon stick, 10 tea bags and tons of sugar," Jen Shaw-Sweet from England tells me the recipe to make tea in the huge pot ready for when refugees and migrants come to the Lighthouse Relief camp. In this image a family prepares to leave the camp and catch a bus to the Moria registration site. They came on a boat packed mainly with women and children.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Art therapy
Before NGOs were expelled from Moria, Lighthouse Relief worked with the Danish Refugee Council running the family compound, where I volunteered. In the art supplies crate there is just one box of crayons left to share between 20 children. A brother and sister from Afghanistan shyly presented me with their drawings.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
'We lost everything'
I ask Farid for permission to take his photo. "We lost everything, pictures don’t matter," he replies. Farid receives shoes for his four-year-old son from a volunteer at Better Days. Farid is fearful for his wife who stayed behind - he has not heard from her in days. While grateful for the shoes, he expresses shame for not being able to provide a new pair for his child.
Image: DW/G. Harvey
Stark reminder
Mountains of life jackets at the "life-jacket graveyard" near Molyvos stand as a stark reminder of the hundreds of thousands of people who landed on Lesbos in the last year. Many are fake, stuffed with foam sponge that if submerged would absorb water and make people sink faster. Many "life jackets" for kids are merely flotation aids suitable for a swimming pool rather than the open seas.
