Lithuania to Offer Border Standards at EU Summit in Salzburg - Press Service

VILNIUS (Sputnik) - Lithuania will offer introducing unified standards for protecting the European Union's external borders at the upcoming informal summit of the bloc's leaders, the press service of the Lithuanian president said.

The press service emphasized in a statement on Wednesday that since Lithuania constantly had the support of the European Union, it attached importance to helping resolve pressing EU issues, such as migration.

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"Lithuania has put forward a proposal to introduce a single set of external border standards. It uses modern technologies to control a 1,070-kilometer [664-mile] EU borderline. However, border protection is inadequate in some member states – which gives illegal migrants easy access to the Schengen area. Lithuania's experience can serve as an example to strengthen EU border control," the statement read.

One measure the country has taken was to send over 100 Lithuanian officers to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency FRONTEX.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite is currently taking part in the two-day EU leaders' summit, hosted by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, which started in the Austrian city of Salzburg earlier in the day. The participants will focus on internal security, Brexit and ways of tackling the migration crisis, which Europe has been facing since 2015.

According to Eurostat's estimates from January 2017, Lithuania is more popular with migrants as a gateway to Western Europe than as a destination country, with non-nationals representing 0.7 percent of its population.