EU Ministers call for swift action to protect borders

Ministers from the European Union nations who are under pressure from unauthorized border crossings asked Friday for more action to strengthen and protect the bloc's external borders as well as to return migrants to their homelands or where they started their journeys.

Interior ministers from EU countries, including Greece, Poland, Italy, Austria and France, which currently holds the EU s rotating presidency, as well as non-aligned Switzerland and Norway, attended a border security conference in Lithuania's capital of Vilnius. European security bodies like Europol and Frontex, the EU's border agency, and the heads of the European security bodies, Ylva Johansson and the heads of European security bodies, also joined the talks.

The Ministers described the influx of migrants as dramatic and urged swift action, including reinforcing the EU s borders and cracking down on people smugglers to protect EU citizens and the lives of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia who are on dangerous journeys to reach Europe.

Johansson told more than 30 officials at the conference that we must protect our borders from aggression and we need to protect our people.

She said stopping people who are fleeing poverty and conflicts in their home countries must be done to stop them from embarking on dangerous migration routes. She stressed the need for a new European system for returning migrants to their homelands if they have no permission to stay in the EU.

We have to prevent people from leaving smuggled routes and to swiftly return people to the country of origin when they have no right to stay. If we establish a European return system, we can do much more on returns. Johansson said that they needed your support to do that.

She said she will look at the plan in more detail at a ministerial meeting in France next month.

We can't wait until we have desperate migrants at our borders. Johansson said that preventative actions must respect the rights of individuals to seek asylum.

She stressed that all EU nations should systematically check travellers against the relevant databases at entry and exit of the bloc's internal visa free Schengen area, and called for strengthening Frontex.

Notis Mitarachi, Greece's minister of migration and asylum, which faces heavy migrant pressures on its sea borders and its land border with Turkey, said the current system is not working.

If people are allowed to arrive in a European member state without any papers and without due process, then the whole Schengen code, the whole Schengen visa system, is meaningless, Mitarachi said.

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski called for amendments to EU migration laws. The authoritarian president of Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, have seen a wave of migrants trying to cross illegally into the EU from Belarus.

Poland is about to start building a tall, permanent metal wall with electronic surveillance systems along its land border with Belarus to prevent unauthorized entry.