MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Europe must replace its current asylum system with a new comprehensive policy, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Thursday.
“I believe we need a common European asylum policy. We must reform the Dublin system in order to distribute refugees fairly within the EU,” Steinmeier said at the Western Balkans summit in Vienna, as quoted by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Germany will allocate up to one million euro ($1.1 million) to help solve the refugee crisis in western Balkans, Steinmeier added.
The European Union is struggling with a refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants attempting to cross into EU member-countries and apply for asylum. The Balkan countries has suffered from an influx of refugees using the peninsula as a transit zone to reach wealthier EU states.
The Dublin Regulation determines the procedure under which EU member states examine asylum applications. The law stipulates receiving countries to store fingerprints and asylum claims to prevent multiple applications in different EU states.
Earlier in the day, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said that the Dublin system was "not working anymore."
