EU Parliamentary Committee Proposes to Revise Bloc's Asylum Claim Scheme

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Europe needs a new system for processing asylum claims, as the current Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that the first EU member country a refugee enters is responsible for handling their asylum application, is unable to cope with the massive influx of migrants, the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) said Wednesday.

The draft resolution to revise the Dublin III Regulation was signed by an overwhelming majority of LIBE members.

The EU committee proposed to create a new central system for receiving and allocating asylum applications, which would relocate refugees from so-called hotspots in member states of first arrival, according to the press release.

The proposal will be voted on during the next European Parliament summit on April 9 in Strasbourg.

After the migration crisis escalated in 2015, some EU countries called for the 1990 Dublin Regulation to be amended as it leads to a disproportionate amount of migrants staying in peripheral EU member states that cannot handle the influx.

Europe is struggling to find a solution to a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The EU border agency Frontex detected over 1.83 million illegal border crossings in 2015, in contrast to some 283,000 in 2014.