Austrian populist Interior Minister Herbert Kickl has announced that the country will be converting all asylum seeker reception centres to departure centres.
The Freedom Party (FPÖ) interior minister made the announcement Monday saying, “With effect from March 1st 2019 there will be no more reception centres in Austria, but only departure centres,” Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reports.
The new policy will see asylum seekers with low probabilities of getting an approved claim staying at the departure centres and would have several limitations imposed upon them.
The limitations will include restrictions on where the asylum seekers are allowed to go and a mandatory curfew from 10 pm to 6 am.
Mr Kickl emphasised that the terms would be voluntary but added, “the ones who do not sign it will find themselves in a place that is far from metropolitan areas, where there is little incentive to hang around at night.”
Austria to Automatically Reject Smuggled Migrants Under Tough New Plans https://t.co/SW8OZeiSR9
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Along with the new departure centres, Kickl is pushing for a constitutional change to allow the government to detain dangerous asylum seekers. “There is a gap in the legal system here, and this gap needs to be closed,” Kickl said.
The push for the change comes after the murder of a government official in Dornbirn, allegedly by an asylum seeker, earlier this month.
The new policies are just the latest anti-mass migration moved from Mr Kickl who has previously introduced plans to tackle people traffickers and illegal migration by automatically rejecting the asylum claims of those involved in trafficking.
Last year, Kickl also invested efforts into boosting border security, creating a new border force named Puma to manage migration along the country’s borders. “We already have effective monitoring that works well. But what certainly cannot happen is a repetition of the year 2015,” he said.
Austria’s policy echoes that of Italy which has also set its migration policy from receiving migrants to deporting illegals and those without valid residency permits.
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