PM says it is time to draw up ‘action plan’
Portugal’s prime minister has announced that the government wants to meet with parliamentary groups next week to draw up an action plan to resolve increasing ‘problems’ with the legalisation of immigrants.
News reports have been full of the time it is taking for immigrants’ claims to be processed – many complaining that Portugal is not respecting their human rights.
In the fortnightly debate in parliament yesterday, Luís Montenegro said: “ I have already asked the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and the Cabinet office minister to start a dialogue with the parliamentary groups on this matter next week” – the aim of which is to gather input (from all parties in parliament) in order to draw up “an action plan, to be carried out immediately, that can resolve the hundreds of thousands of backlogged cases and that can, in the future, prevent them from accumulating again.
“Our aim is to continue to be a country that welcomes and integrates immigrants but, in order to give dignity, we must have greater regulation and stop allowing the abuse of what are currently provisions contained in our legislation,” he said.
In the final part of the debate, in response to PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares, the prime minister admitted that the problems that exist today at the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) are “delicate and profound”.
“No one likes to see the undignified conditions in which many human beings who come to the country to work are subjected,” he said, adding that the long queues and delays that have taken place at AIMA have generated unease and feelings of insecurity.
For the PM, the problems at AIMA are “the result of several accumulated errors in border control and reception policies“.
Source material: LUSA
