Finland to Change Law on Refugees to Comply With EU Court Ruling

HELSINKI (Sputnik) - Finland intends to ensure the country's compliance with the recent ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the family reunification rights for refugee minors, the head of the Immigration Department at the Interior Ministry said on Friday.

"The law on foreigners will be fixed, but I cannot tell you how soon… The reform of the law should probably be combined with some other project," Jorma Vuorio said.

The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) will find all the cases where the new ruling is applicable, a senior official at Migri Sanna Helariutta reportedly said.

At the moment the ECJ decision concerns 75 cases in Finland that are already being processed.

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In April, the ECJ ruled that refugee minors had the right to family reunification as long as they were younger than 18 at the moment the reunification procedure was launched. Earlier, in some countries, including Finland, they had to remain minors for the duration of the procedure for it to be applicable.

Since 2015, Europe has been struggling to cope with the massive wave of immigration, with hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing their war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa. According to Eurostat, there were more than 3 200 000 first time asylum applicants in the European Union since 2015.