The international community should pool efforts to develop a strategy that would envisage in the long term the measures necessary to cope with the refugee and migration crisis. This is what President Rumen Radev called for at a working meeting held within the framework of the Munich Security Conference dedicated to the problems of the refugees in Europe. The Head of State emphasized that the existing rules and regulations fail to ensure a sustainable solution not only to the causes for the migration processes, but also to the problem of refugee integration and this will be a topical issue on the international agenda in the years to come.
“Not a single country was prepared when the crisis broke out and currently many European countries are facing the challenge of achieving the real integration of thousands of refugees,” the President said. In Rumen Radev’s view, for the future joint strategy to be successful, the question of what real integration means and how it can be achieved must be answered. “When you go to another country, you have to obey its rules. How far you go in preserving your own values and accepting new values is the key to integration in a given society,” the Bulgarian President said.
The meeting highlighted the need to draw a distinction between the approaches applied to the war-fleeing refugees, on the one hand, and the economic migrants, on the other. The participants in the forum further called for observing the rights of the asylum seekers and taking harsher measures against and imposing harsher punishment on the perpetrators of illegal human trafficking.
The meeting was attended by Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for the European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, as well as by senior representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and government ministers.