Humanitarian Aid: Refugees in Greece and the Balkans Debate
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Philip Hollobone
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Humanitarian Aid: Refugees in Greece and the Balkans
Philip Hollobone Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Justine Greening
The right hon. Lady makes an important point very clearly. The UK has helped the International Organisation for Migration to do better evidence gathering to find out what is happening on the ground. Part of the challenge is that people, including children, often turn up without any papers. Some people are even concerned about registering with the authorities in the countries that they reach because they are worried that they will not be able to continue their journey. This is a complicated situation, but I assure her that we are playing a key role in getting support to refugees who arrive here in Europe, including children.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend for the magnificent and effective way in which she is fulfilling the responsibilities of her office. The fact that the UK is second only to the United States in the amount of aid it is giving to the region is testimony to her efforts. Is it not the case that were all other EU countries to contribute towards aid in the region in proportion to what the UK is doing, the problem presenting itself on the Turkey/Greece border would not be nearly at its present scale?
Justine Greening
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, the cost that many European countries now face to support refugees who felt that they had no choice but to set off on a life-or-death journey is immense. That money would have been spent far more effectively, produced far greater value for money and enabled support to get to many more people had it been put directly into the UN effort on the ground, working with generous countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which have taken so many refugees. If we had worked with those countries more effectively, many of the refugees—I have met many of them in my visits to the region over the past few years—would have done what they had wanted to do, which was to stay there in the hope that, in time, they could rebuild their lives and go back to Syria.