Worksheet Group 1
Give reasons / arguments that justify the need to re-establish the controls on borders between Schengen countries.Worksheet Group 2
Give reasons / arguments that say the European Union has Europe has European Union has a responsibility to support migrants and contribute to resolving the migrant crisis.Worksheet Group 3
Give arguments that speak in favour of the following theses.The visa application procedure is simple / The visa application procedure is not simple
GROUP 1
Hungarian President, Viktor Orban, on migrant crisis – September 2015.
“Europe, its borders and Christian values are defended by wire – That was the resume and astounding message of the Hungarian Prime-minister, Viktor Orban, who repeated, in the text published by Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung, that Hungary will do everything to defend the Schengen borders. As if faced with ‘Barbarian hordes’ and not miserable people running away from the war, Orban presented the barbed wire fence on the border between Serbia and Hungary as his accomplishment and not as a shameful act:
“We are not building a barbed-wire fence to have fun, but because it is necessary. The wire is simply the line of defence and a protection from inflow of refugees who are threatening to undermine the Christian Europe.”
Source: Politika, Author: ZoranaSuvakovic, 03.09.2015. у 22:00 (Politika, serbian daily newspaper) (May 23, 2016)
A controversial statement by Milos Zeman – ‘Impossible integration of Muslims’ – January 2016.
“The Czech President, Milos Zeman, said that the European experience showed the uselessness of integration of Muslim communities into the European society. The West European countries experience, where you have ghettos and closed areas… once again showed that the integration of Muslims is impossible – said Zeman for ‘Blesk’ magazine. He said he will fight against the mandatory quotas for acceptance of migrants, where the EU member states are asked to receive the refugees proportionally to their population, size and budget”.
Source: DnevniAvaz, 18 January 2016 (DnevniAvazbosnian daily newspaper).
EU leaders agree security checks for every traveller, as EU calls for Brussels intelligence agency
“The future of Europe’s Schengen free travel zone was cast into doubt again on Friday after France declared that it would impose border controls indefinitely in the wake of the Paris massacre. Since last Friday’s attacks, checkpoints have been established on major routes between France and Belgium with drivers and passengers subject to passport checks. Passengers have been searched on some cross-border trains, with armed guards patrolling the carriages. While complying with the letter of the Schengen code which allows emergency border controls, the move is another blow for the free travel zone after Germany, Austria, Denmark and other states resurrected long-abandoned border controls in a bid to control the influx of hundreds of thousands of It came as the European Commission bowed to French fury and agreed to rewrite the Schengen code to ensure the systematic security screening of every EU traveler before they can enter the continent – a further erosion of the principle of free movement but something Mr Cazeneuve said was “crucial” to defend against terrorism and migrants this summer“.
*This article is from November 20, 2015.
Source: risk-as- France-imposes-indefinite-border- controls.html (May 21st 2016)
Sweden imposes ID checks on bridge from Denmark to stem migrant influx
“Travellers warned to expect long delays on the Oresund bridge-and-tunnel link, which had become a major entry point for refugees.
Denmark imposed temporary identity checks on its border with Germany on Monday following a similar move by Sweden, dealing a double blow to Europe's fraying passport-free Schengen area amid a record influx of migrants.
Sweden began checking documents of travellers from Denmark on Monday for the first time in half a century, causing delays of up to 50 minutes for trains and buses crossing the 4.9 mile Oresund Bridge, Europe's longest combined road and rail bridge. However private vehicles were exempt from the checks.
Denmark's prime minister said Sweden's move gave his country no option but to impose its own border controls and he appealed to the European Union to take "collective decisions" to better protect its external borders against the tide of migrants“.
*This article is published by AFP on January 2016.
Source: (May 20 2016)
By AFP2:00PM GMT 04 Jan 2016
Barbed-wire on Hungarian border; August 2015.
GROUP 2
How did Angela Merkel become a refugee mother
“A few days after a truck with bodies of the migrants was found on a road in Austria, Merkel gave up Dublin rules set long ago, stipulating that migrants are obliged to apply for the asylum in the first country of the EU they enter. All the other states of the EU, according to that rule, may deport the migrants to that first country of entrance. Such a procedure was determined so that asylum seekers are not in a position to trade with their misery and select a country that would provide bigger material aid. In practice it meant that Italy, Greece and Spain, countries most heavily hit by the economic crisis, would have to suffer the biggest costs to take care of the migrants. The German Chancellor joined Sweden and announced that her country shall accept all migrants from Syria, regardless in which country of the Mediterranean they managed to reach Europe”.
*This article is published by ‘Politika’,Thursday, 3 Sep. 2015, at 15:00
*Politika - daily newspaper from Serbia.
Chairman of the European Commission warns: End of Schengen means end of Euro – January 2016.
“The reputation of the EU in the world is endangered due to the failure of the member countries to manage the refugee crisis, said yesterday the Chairman of the EC, Jean Clode Juncker in Brussels … It is unacceptable that some member states claim they will not receive refugees. It is not possible… He said it was embarrassing for him to discuss the migration problems faced by European leaders to the representatives of Lebanon and Jordan, countries that accepted over 2 million refugees…
According to Euronews, Juncker warned that unemployment in the EU will rise if the Schengen zone crumbles… The Schengen is one of the biggest achievements of the European integration. Without Schengen, without free movement of labor, without freedom to travel, the Euro has no sense, warned Juncker. He also said that if someone wants to kill Schengen, it will eventually kill the unified market, which will bring the problem of unemployment and smaller economic growth in Europe”.
Source: ‘Oslobođenje’, 16 January 2016.
*Oslobođenje - daily newspaper from BiH
Médecins Sans Frontières criticised Europe for its behaviour in refugee crisis – January 2016.
Europe made the refugee crisis of 2015 ‘a lot worse’ by failing, regretfully, to take the responsibility for exodus throwing over 1 million people out on the streets, said Médecins Sans Frontières in a report published today.
“We will remember 2015 as a year in which Europe, regretfully, missed to take the responsibility and respond to urgent needs for help and protection of over a million men, women and children” assessed the NGO. ...
Reminding that almost 3800 died attempting to cross the Mediterranean last year, the Médecins Sans Frontières condemn the European refusal to propose ‘legal and safe alternatives to hazardous sea travel’. That way more than a million people ended up in the hands of smugglers and over-crowded boats.
The NGO also criticised the acceptance terms, particularly in Greece, where the authorities ‘failed to organize humane and appropriate system of reception’, especially with the registration of migrants.
Médecins Sans Frontières are repulsed by ‘single-sided and irresponsible decisions on closing borders in Europe and lack of cooperation between the member states that gamble with health and dignity of migrants, opening and closing their borders in a dangerously unpredictable way’.
Source: Index, 19 Jan. 2016
Greek Minister Calls Refugee Tent City ‘Modern-Day Dachau’ – March 2016.
„Greece’s Interior Minister Panagiotis Kouroumblis described the Idomeni refugee tent city as a “modern-day Dachau” and blamed Europe’s closed borders policy for that.
The minister criticized the living conditions of the makeshift refugee camp at Idomeni, on the Greece-Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia border. He went to the extent of likening the tent city to the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau.
“I do not hesitate to say that this is a modern-day Dachau, the result of the logic of closed borders… We believed in a Europe of open borders,” Kouroumblis said during his visit to the region.“
Source: By A. Makris- Mar 18, 2016
(May 24th 2016)
Journalist JerkoBakotin on situation in Idomeni camp – April 2016.
I spent some 15 days in Idomeni. The situation varies, depending on weather conditions: When it is sunny, or at least, dry, then it is ‘just’ awful, but when it rains it gets a lot worse… To put the rhetoric aside, some 12 thousand people are stuck there for weeks, without any idea what will happen to them…. Speaking of insensitiveness, I think Europe’s hypocrisy is more important than moralising about ‘moral crisis’. The key moment is that the West behaves as if those people are an elementary disaster falling out of the sky. However, their exodus is in a good part a consequence of western interventions and destroying the Middle East and other countries – from Libya to Afghanistan. Now the West should accept a small portion of those for whose misery it is partly responsible, once again it turned out that stories about human rights, solidarity and so on are nothing but empty mumblings when it comes to people who, to their misfortune, are not Christian and white enough.
It is not about ‘refugee crisis’ really – we are not faced with dozens of millions, but two-three million people, which is still less than 1% of the total EU population. The most powerful economic block in the world, a union of countries with 550 million people, is not able to integrate less than 1% of people who fled before slaughter and poverty – it is tragicomic. The EU turned out to be a joke, and an incompetent and a racist joke that is, welcoming the troubled people with barbed wire”.
Source: (April 1st 2016)
Image taken by J. Bakotin at Idomeni refugee camp, April 2016. (Author gave its permission for use of his photo)
GROUP 3
Personal experiences of getting visas to travel abroad to Schengen and other EU countries
To be isolated is not a nice feeling.
„To control your movement in other countries it makes you feel different from others, and prejudged. As citizens of Kosovo, we are required to have visas to travel. Personally, I have a lot of Schengen visas, but all of them for work reasons, not for family reasons or just for fun. Because I need to travel so I can do my job, I always acquire visas. It is an exhausting task to prepare the documents that are required and it takes up to 10 days. Your folder with the needed documents is going to be thick, some of the needed documents are originals and some copies, depending on the Embassy. You waste a great deal of time waiting in long lines to acquire the proper paper work. Preliminarily, you need to make an appointment for the visa, and there is a lot of people in front of you so you have to wait. Depending on the location of the Embassy, sometimes the roads get blocked by people waiting in front of the Embassy building “.
D.X, history teacher from Kosovo. Interview on May 09, 2016.
Personal experience for obtaining VISA for Great Britain
In order to get Visa for Great Britain BiH citizens should prepare one photograph, employment certificate and a Bank statement about the salary in the past three months. These documents have to be translated into English, and the translation is submitted along with the originals.
Next, the web-site of the British Embassy contains a 14-page application that needs to be filled, printed and signed.
After that, all documents must be brought to Sarajevo, to the agency that mediates sending the documentation to the British Embassy in Warsaw, in the exactly scheduled time. Delay is not allowed. That means that BiH citizens must take a day-off and bring those papers to Sarajevo and bear the travel costs for that purpose.
Prior to going for an on-line interview, the Visa fee has to be paid in the amount of 188 Euros (average salary in BiH is about 400 Euros).
The citizens requiring Visa, during their interview in Sarajevo, get their retinal scans made and fingerprints taken of all fingers on both hands. The citizens are also photographed.
On arrival to Great Britain (it happened to me on airport in Belfast on March 16, 2016), BiH citizens may be asked to go to a separate room where prints from thumbs and pointing fingers on both hands will be taken.
T.J. citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Interview August 28, 2016.
Visa for one day
“For my post-graduate studies, I often had to travel to Turkey. When Bulgaria entered the EU it started to be a problem for travelling by Bus, since we could not cross Bulgaria without visa. Considering that air tickets were three times more expensive, road trip and transit visa was the only alternative. The fact I had to travel was a problem by itself, and now I had to obtain the visa. I like to travel by bus, air tickets are conditioning you, you have to go on a certain day and in certain time, while by Bus you can decide on daily basis if you want to travel or not.
The appointment in Bulgarian embassy is set via phone and to do that you need to have 5 Euro credit in a cell phone, with VALA operator sim card. The phone talk cost 2,5 Euro. My appointment was scheduled for ten days at 10:17 hrs. It was strange to me the minute 17, considering that usually 5 minutes period is used to set time periods.
Necessary documents were birth certificate, marriage certificate, family list and a photograph. On the day of appointment, I paid 60.00 Euro in the bank.
I came to Bulgarian Embassy ahead of scheduled time. I could not enter the court of the Embassy, so I waited in the street. When it was my turn, I was called by the Embassy officer, and without being accompanied I came into a small space set for visa operations, which was not accessible through the main entrance of the Embassy building.
We communicated through a window that did not have any opening, the sound was coming out of a loudspeaker. After submitting my documents, they asked me what I needed the visa for, considering that I brought the photo as well, then they took another photo for the passport and they took the prints of all my fingers. Taking the finger prints and entering a guarded building with video surveillance somehow caused a feeling of fear in me.
The officer told me I will get the visa after one week. It meant I had to travel to Prishtina twice, which was additional expense for me. A week later I took my passport and I immediately checked the visa validity dates. After all the trouble I got a transit visa that was valid for 24 hours, or one day. The reason for that was that it was my first visa application. Despite all my obligations, next time I had to go through the whole exercise again. But next time it was easier for I already knew the procedure, and in the second application I got a transit visa I could use for one year.”
F.D. from Kosovo, Interview April 2016.
Think:
1)Question: How does it feel for citizen of Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina to travel abroad, to Schengen countries or other countries where there is still a visa regime?
2)Question:What are the main reasons for people from these countries to feel isolated from the rest of Europeans?
Official requirements and procedure to follow to apply for visa
If you live in BiH and if you would like to visit GB these are the list of demands to be fulfilled in order to submit Visa request
Information from 2016. Documents you must provide (documents not in English or Welsh must be in certified translation).
When you apply you’ll need to provide:
• current passport or other valid travel identification
•evidence that you can support yourself during your trip, e.g. bank statements or pay slips from the last 6 months
You’ll need to provide the following:
•the dates you’re planning to travel to the UK
•details of where you’ll be staying during your visit
•how much you think your trip will cost
•your current home address and how long you’ve lived there
•your parents’ names and dates of birth
•how much you earn in a year
You might also need:
•details of your travel history for the past 10 years (as shown in your passport)
•your employer’s address and telephone number
•your partner’s name, date of birth, and passport number
•the name and address of anyone paying for your trip
•the name, address and passport number of any family members you have in the UK