• Spain has resettled just 643 asylum seekers of 160,000 pledged in EU accord
• EU countries have taken 5,651 refugees in total, expect 30,000 in coming year
Spain this week accepted an additional 69 refugees from Syrian and Iraq, who arrived Tuesday and Wednesday to the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport from refugee camps in Greece and will be relocated around the country with the help of local governments and non-governmental organisations working with refugee resettlement.
The arrival of the 31 refugees on Tuesday and 38 Wednesday brings to a total of just 643 asylum-seekers that Spain has so far accepted, 363 from refugee camps in Greece and Italy and 279 from camps in Turkey and Lebanon, of the 16,000 the Spanish government agreed to take under the terms of a 2015 EU agreement on refugee resettlement.
So far, European governments have only resettled 5,651 asylum seekers of the 160,000 contemplated in the 2015 EU accord, with the European Commission announcing Wednesday that it expects an additional 30,000 refugees to be relocated from the camps in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Lebanon in the coming year.
► Read More in Spanish at Europa Press, La Razón and El Periódico …
