Iranian Official Urges Europe’s Soft Line on Refugees
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called on Europe to adopt a more sympathetic approach towards the refugees who have fled their countries due to the West’s wrong policies.
“The international community expects the European countries, which claim to advocate human rights, to hold a more compassionate approach to the migrants who have been displaced as a result of the wrong policies of the West and dictators in recent years,” Ayatollah Rafsanjani said Sunday in a meeting in Tehran with Chairman of Poland’s Senate Bogdan Borusewicz.
He said it is surprising that a bloc of 30 European countries views the arrival of less than a million refugees as a “crisis”, while Iran used to host more than 3 million refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq even at a time when it was grappling with war.
Borusewicz, for his part, said Poland is ready to help the human society on compassionate grounds.
But, the Polish senator added, the influx of 8,000 refugees into Germany and Sweden each day signifies a crisis that should be settled with right decisions.
Over the past few months, a huge number of refugees from Syria, Iraq and African countries have flocked into Europe, mainly through Turkey, Greece and Italy.
Meanwhile, the EU has launched a migrant relocation scheme. Some EU member states object to the scheme.
Under the EU's plan, 120,000 refugees will be redistributed from Italy and Greece to other European countries. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia object, urging the EU instead to reinforce the bloc's external borders.
