Austria’s Chancellor Kurz said that would not be in line with the EU’s so-called Dublin Regulation on asylum, he also offered to close EU’s external borders, not internal frontiers, Politico reported.
After Monday’s Merkel-Seehofer meeting, Sebastian Kurz distanced himself from his ideological ally Horst Seehofer. This week, Merkel agreed to Seehofer’s demand to set up transit centres on the Austrian border to ensure that asylum seekers already registered elsewhere in the EU are swiftly deported to that country.
The migrant crisis in the EU needs to be resolved as soon as possible, and German interior minister offer for Germany to turn back migrants at the country’s border who have previously applied for asylum. But Austria’s leader commented that:
“The Dublin rules require people who have been registered to be returned to the country in which they were first registered — and certainly not to just any other European country,”
Kurz said on his way to an EU summit in Brussels and underlined the importance of strengthening the EU’s external border, not internal frontiers.
The 31-year-old Chancellor pointed out that his landlocked country is an unlikely port of entry for irregular migrants.
“Anyone who knows the geographical situation of Austria knows that people would have had to parachute in,”
he said.
Millenial and the leader of Austria’s centre-right People’s Party, Mr Kurz swept to power last fall by mimicking the far-right’s policies on the campaign trail, then chose as his coalition partner a far-right party that has frequently engaged in anti-Muslim and anti-refugee rhetoric.
