Interior minister at JHA meeting: Romania will accept 1,785 asylum seekers, rejects mandatory quotas

Romanian deputy premier, Interior minister Gabriel Oprea told the extraordinary meeting in Brussels of the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs Council (JHA) on Monday that Romania would be part of the relocation mechanism and would take over 1,705 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece and other 80 persons from outside EU, but that it rejected the mandatory migrant quotas imposed by the European Commission.

Oprea also told the meeting that Romania supports the need for a joint approach of the migration issue, insisting that consistency is needed with the strategic guidelines of an extraordinary European Council meeting of April 23 in relation to the voluntary nature of the EU solidarity measures, reads a press release issued by the Interior ministry.

At the same time, the minister pointed out that in order for a new political commitment to be made to intra-EU relocation, “a very careful quantification is needed of all the practical aspects arising from such measure such as financial implications, the state of the national reception facilities, the integration of relocated people with the host countries, the relocation duration as well as aspects of their returning.”

In his conversations with the other interior ministers of the EU and members of the European Commission, Oprea underscored that Romania is an active contributor to the joint security of the European Union, being second in terms of experts operating with FRONTEX and especially by providing security for 2,070 km of the European Union’s external borders, which it does responsibly and acting as a de facto member of the Schengen Area.

“We have always supported the application of the principle of solidarity, and Romania knows how to be solidary with its European Union partners,” Oprea told the JHA Council meeting, according to the above-mentioned source.

Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs gathered in Brussels on Monday failed to reach an agreement on the EC plan to relocate 120,000 refugees, due to the hard opposition of Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A new JHA meeting is scheduled on October 8.