Premier Matteo Renzi said
Tuesday that while Italy is Austria's friend, it demands respect
for EU rules.
His remarks came after Austria began building a 250-meter
barrier across road links with Italy at the Brenner Pass border
crossing in the Alps as a way to keep asylum seekers out.
Speaking during a mission to Iran with an Italian business
delegation, Renzi said he has asked Italy's EU representative,
undersecretary Carlo Calenda, "to verify all the regulations at
the European level to assess the correctness of the things that
Austria is doing".
He said "there is friendship with Austria but we demand EU
rules be respected".
Austria is erecting the fence in light of what it says will
be an estimated doubling of asylum seeker arrivals, to 300,000,
across the Mediterranean to Italy this year.
Also on Tuesday, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said
Austria's decision to erect the barrier is "unexplainable and
unjustifiable".
Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said
Italy's "agitation" over the Brenner Pass barrier is
"incomprehensible". Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann defended
the move as "desirable, necessary and just" and that doing
nothing was "out of the question". He also said he would take
full responsibility for the decision.
Austria came under fire earlier in the day from EU
officials and leading human rights organizations.
"What is happening at the border between Italy and Austria
is not the right solution," EU Migration and Home Affairs
Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told the European Parliament
in Strasbourg.
Amnesty International Italy said Austria's move will create
a bottleneck and a humanitarian crisis such as the one taking
place at the border between Greece and Macedonia, where
thousands of refugees from Syria and other war zones have
languished in limbo in a makeshift camp at Idomeni for months.
"Austria has decided to raise... an obstacle that will
create a situation similar to Idomeni," Amnesty International
Italy Director Gianni Rufini said. "We will find ourselves with
improvised camps and a humanitarian crisis...that this should
happen today on European soil is disappointing and depressing".
Humanitarian group Doctors without Borders (MSF) said
border police at Idomeni have injured 200 people with tear gas
and another 37 with rubber bullets, which were being shot "at
children's height".
"At least three children were wounded by these
projectiles," Doctors Without Borders (MSF) President Loris De
Filippi told a press conference in Rome. "It is an aberrant
situation, created by Europe and left unsolved by Europe".
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