Over 23,000 asylum seekers
have reached Italy and Greece since the beginning of the year,
the International Organization on Migrations (IOM) said
Wednesday.
At least 58 of them have died trying to reach Europe, the
OIM said.
A total of 22,895 made it to Greece and 260 to Italy -
against a total of 6,000 in January 2014 and January 2015
together, the organization said.
That number has quadrupled and more than half of January is
still ahead," said IOM spokesman Joel Millman.
One million asylum seekers reached Europe in 2015, most of
them from war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Also on Wednesday, the first vice-president of the European
Commission, Frans Timmermans, said the Schengen Area must get
back to normal this year.
"We must give clear results in the coming weeks on
recovering border control and reducing migration flows," he
said.
"We must make sure the hotspots (for asylum seeker
identification and processing) become fully operational and that
new arrivals are registered and fingerprinted," said Timmermans,
adding the EU is giving Greece 1.36 million euros to buy 90
fingerprinting machines.
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