Children look out at the sunset over the Bamarne IDP camp in northern Iraq. Photo: UK DFID. Flickr. Some rights reserved. Towards the end of the summer and the autumn of 2016 some countries, specially, Germany and Sweden experienced an unprecedented flow of refugees who were fleeing the conflicts of Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. More than one million people were hosted in a very short time with the effort of the whole public administration and the citizens. Many cities in those countries collaborated in an extraordinary effort made by the state, regions and länder to solve the human but also the immense logistic challenge.
At the same time, during the fall of 2015 the 27 countries that form the EU agreed on a plan to relocate 120,000 refugees from Greece, Italy and Hungary and resettle 22,504 refugees from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
More than a year later, the official figures show that only 6,925 refugees have been relocated from Greece and Italy (5.7% of the overall commitment) and 11,852 relocated from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (52%). How is it possible that the 27 EU states that represent the most developed economies of the world, with more than 507 million inhabitants, are unable to fulfil this agreement? How come the results are so bad? A 5.7% achievement, by any standard of evaluation, is a very poor performance.
