Cyprus seeking to spread refugee burden

Cyprus will seeking to spread the refugee burden across all 25 member states at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday.

Cyprus has handled an estimated 50,000 refugees from Lebanon since the conflict began.

Speaking in response to questions about the influx of refugees, Foreign Minister George Lillikas said “If there is such need, our position is that this should be dealt with on European level with a decision binding the EU 25 distributing the refugees to the 25 member states so that problems to one member state would be avoided.”

“Cyprus submitted to the EU a specific proposal providing the transferring of these people to other European countries through Cyprus and then their repatriation to the country of origin”.

With this way the number of people to be repatriated would be very small for each country, he explained, adding that all these will be discussed next Tuesday, when there will be extraordinary meeting of the EU’s Foreign Ministers.