UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) — Monaco is accepting refugees but in limited numbers due to the small size of the country, Monaco's Minister of State Serge Telle told Sputnik on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
"Yes, we take refugees," Telle said. "Very few, we are a very small country of 40,000 people so we can not take 40,000 refugees so we have a very limited number of people."
27 August 2016, 20:12 GMT
When asked whether they are planning on accepting more refugees this or next year, Telle said, "No, because our part is very symbolic."
"It is difficult to answer this question, it will depend on many factors. The size of our territory and our population do not allow to take hundreds of thousands of refugees," he explained.
Since 2015, Europe has been beset by a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants fleeing their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa to escape violence and poverty. Some 1.8 million illegal border crossings were detected by the EU border agency Frontex in 2015.
