300 Million Euro to Greece – Where are the money?

Germany’s Minister of the Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, 

next to Greece’s Minister for Citizen Protection, Chritos Papoutsis

by Simona Ion Bădulescu

Greece was inevitably in the spotlight at the yesterday’s press conference of JHA ministers, through their admission that even though they respect the guiding principle of human rights, they can’t safeguard them more than they’re presently doing. “We can’t afford so many illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. We are trying to help them and offer them basic humanitarian conditions, but this is all what we can do right now“, said the Greek Minister for the Protection of the Citizen, Christos Papoutsis.

Greece itself agrees with the fact that they can’t manage the current situation and they’re begging for help from the European Union and implicitly its member states. “You can call it a disaster! The human rights are going down. We really need help from EU and also some bilateral agreements with the third countries because we can’t deal the problem so much, as we really would like”, Papoutsis continued.

But what have they done in order to strengthen their own borders so far? How have they spent the money they’ve received? These are the questions German Federal Minster for the Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, would like to have answered: “Germany provided 300 million euro to Greece in order for it to strengthen its borders“. While Germany is making efforts to understand the Greece’s situation and how difficult it is to be an EU border country, especially when a lot of inflows of immigrants are coming from Turkey, Hans-Peter Friedrich can’t help raise the questions of what happened to the money Greece already received: “Germany is turning not towards Greece, but towards EU to provide a better system, a better framework to help Greece in dealing with this issue. A European Union solution would be transparency in knowing how the money has been spent.”

This is not to side with or against any particular member state, but maybe this time we can agree with Federal Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, when she mentioned that Germany does not request of introducing any kind of punitive measures against Greece. They would simply like to know if theCommission is taking into account the probability of adding control mechanisms to monitor if countries are complying with the requirements and the goals of the programs and aims, for which they receive EU funding. When asked how to solve the conflict with Greece, she answers very sincerely: “There is not a conflict! It is an attempt to get deeper into the details of the work Greece has done so far to prevent the influx of illegal immigrants to its territory, and whether Greece has something concrete to offer other member states, except of requesting more funding, before clarifying how effectively the previous and current funding is being used.”