EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos on Monday referred to the significant progress achieved on the refugees issue within a month at the Justice and Home Affairs Council which was held in Brussels.

Mr. Avramopoulos referred extensively to the hotspots and the redistribution system.

He also briefed the ministers on the progress made on the implementation of the action plan of 17 points which was agreed at the Western Balkans’ route summit and spoke particularly of the weekly contact point video conferences and a monitoring system for the flows.

As Mr. Avramopoulos said the deployment of 400 police officers to Slovenia is in progress adding that so far, member states have pledged to offer a total of 250 officers by mid-November.

“We are now counting on countries along the route to increase reception capacities to reach the 100,000 places,” Mr. Avramopoulos underlined.

Regarding the hotspot approach and the relocation system, he said that an important start has been made. “The hotspots in Lampedusa is now in place. The others will follow. We have already relocated the 147 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece.”

“On relocation, we need to move from the dozens to the hundreds if we want to make sure that this scheme will work properly. And the rest of the hotspots still need to be implemented by the end of November,” he added.

Mr. Avramopoulos stressed that in order to speed up the process, the Commission will deploy support officers to Greece and Italy in the coming days.

Commissioner Avramopoulos said that safeguarding the EU’s external borders is one of the four pillars of the European Agenda on Migration.

“We will do so by strengthening the role of Frontex and by developing EU-wide standards, and we will also table a proposal for a European Border and Coast Guard by the end of the year,” he said.