PRAGUE (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st October, 2019) Countries that do not want to host refugees on their territory should make efforts to address causes of migration, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Monday at a press conference in Prague after the talks with his Czech counterpart, Tomas Petricek.
Last week, the interior ministers of Germany, Finland, France, Italy, and Malta at the meeting in the Maltese capital of Valletta agreed to share the burden of migrants arriving from Northern Africa by sea. In particular, the deal envisages a voluntary rotation of the ports where migrants will disembark.
"In our opinion, all EU member states should take part in solving the migration problem. At the same time, we see that there is no consensus among the states on this matter. We believe that countries that do not want to accept refugees on their territory should make efforts to fight causes behind the migration," Maas said.
Petricek, in turn, said that Prague was also calling on consolidated response to the migration issue, participating in various ways in solving the problems of countries from which refugees were coming to Europe. The Czech foreign minister stressed that his country did not completely close borders for refugees and continued to accept migrants from the Balkan and Eastern European states, as well as from Mongolia and Vietnam.
Earlier in the day, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis slammed the idea of sharing the burden of migrants between the EU states, saying that this approach was unsystematic, and called on European countries to be more proactive in searching for ways of tackling the problem.
