France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, has announced that his country will receive 10,000 refugees by 2019. This was revealed last Monday subsequent to a meeting with the President of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi. 

“I wish that we better host those that can seek asylum, for administrative delays to be accelerated as they are currently inhuman and inefficient, have language, housing and employment integration programmes and for us to be stricter in the repatriation of those that do not have the right to this procedure,” the French President said.

Amongst the 10,000 refugees who will be granted asylum, 3,000 will come from sub-Saharan African knowingly from Niger and Chad. In this framework, Paris has announced the upcoming visit, in the weeks to come, of the first delegation of the French office for refugees’ and stateless persons’ protection (OFPRA) in Niamey, to study applications of asylum seekers.   

This decision comes after the signing of a principle agreement at a mini-summit held in Paris last August. It falls in line with France’s new migration policy which consists in processing applications of African asylum seekers on the continent itself. This policy aims to sort out the applications and grant asylum to endangered seekers (by a political regime for example).

However, Paris has given up on the idea to install an OFPRA mission in Libya for security reasons, as planned in July 2017. As for the 7,000 remaining refugees who will obtain asylum, they will come from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Guevanis DOH