Detain migrants for up to 18 months: EU president Tusk

Volunteers help refugees to disembark from a vessel after their arrival on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos on Thursday. — AP

Irregular migrants to Europe should be detained for as long as needed to check their identity and if need be up to the 18 months allowed by international law, European Council president Donald Tusk said.

In an interview with several newspapers, Mr Tusk said Europe had to stop a huge influx of migrants, most of them not refugees from war, and should not underestimate the security threat it represented. He stressed that it was a priority to protect the external frontiers of Europe’s internal, passport-free Schengen zone. Mr Tusk said border guards needed time to properly identify people who were arriving in the EU. Stating that international and EU rules allowed detention up to 18 months for such checks, he was quoted by Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung as saying: “We can and should hold migrants for as long as needed until the verification is complete.”

Meanwhile, Denmark voted on Thursday to decide whether to adopt some EU rules, testing for the first time one of the country’s decades-old exemptions from European integration since Danes resoundingly rejected the euro in 2000. The government, together with the main Opposition party, argues Denmark needs to adopt some EU justice and home affairs laws to keep the country within the cross-border policing agency Europol.