00:45Germany: Munichers give refugees a warm welcome to their city
Several hundred residents of Munich flocked to the city’s main station on Saturday to applaud the refugees arriving from Austria. Some in the crowd handed out donations to the refugees, including sweets for children and bottles of water for the thirsty. The refugees will now board buses bound for locations across Bavaria, which have been designated to temporarily house them.
A total of 6,000 refugees had arrived in Munich after crossing from Austria on Saturday evening. Some 460 people took the train to Frankfurt that evening, while while another 800 went to Dortmund. Their journey initially started at Budapest, where Hungarian authorities had taken radical measures in early September to deal with the unprecedented numbers of people crossing their borders, many without documentation. Firstly, they closed the main station, shutting off access to trains leading to Austria, Germany and other European destinations. This led to a temporary encampment being set up around Keleti station, housing around 3,000 refugees. When the station re-opened, many boarded trains that were destined for processing and detention camps, not other countries as they thought.
On August 21 Germany declared its suspension of the Dublin Regulation for Syrian refugees. The regulation states that migrants can only claim asylum in the country they first enter on EU territory; they could face deportation should they try any other country. However Germany is now permitting officers to process applications of Syrian asylum seekers even if they travelled through other EU countries first.
00:45Several hundred residents of Munich flocked to the city’s main station on Saturday to applaud the refugees arriving from Austria. Some in the crowd handed out donations to the refugees, including sweets for children and bottles of water for the thirsty. The refugees will now board buses bound for locations across Bavaria, which have been designated to temporarily house them.
A total of 6,000 refugees had arrived in Munich after crossing from Austria on Saturday evening. Some 460 people took the train to Frankfurt that evening, while while another 800 went to Dortmund. Their journey initially started at Budapest, where Hungarian authorities had taken radical measures in early September to deal with the unprecedented numbers of people crossing their borders, many without documentation. Firstly, they closed the main station, shutting off access to trains leading to Austria, Germany and other European destinations. This led to a temporary encampment being set up around Keleti station, housing around 3,000 refugees. When the station re-opened, many boarded trains that were destined for processing and detention camps, not other countries as they thought.
On August 21 Germany declared its suspension of the Dublin Regulation for Syrian refugees. The regulation states that migrants can only claim asylum in the country they first enter on EU territory; they could face deportation should they try any other country. However Germany is now permitting officers to process applications of Syrian asylum seekers even if they travelled through other EU countries first.