GENEVA Cheap Nike Air Max 1 Shoes , Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- Switzerland on Thursday called on all European countries to honor their quotas as part of a EU pledge to redistribute some 160,000 asylum seekers Cheap Nike Air Max Thea Shoes , local media reported.
At a meeting of European ministers in Brussels, Swiss Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said Switzerland will honor its promise of taking in 1 Cheap Nike Air Max 2017 Shoes ,500 refugees from Italy and Greece by the end of this year.
She said the program only works if everyone acts in the same manner, and that a European migration policy cannot be achieved without solidarity.
Sommaruga also called for EU members to support migrants who are willing to return to their country of origin voluntarily.
Switzerland is currently providing financial support to the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programs. Over 38 Cheap Nike Air Max 2018 Shoes ,000 migrants were assisted with voluntary return by the IOM in the first half of 2017, of which 73 percent were from the European Economic Area and Switzerland.
In 2015 Cheap Nike Air Max Shoes , the European resettlement scheme was passed to reduce pressure on frontier countries like Italy and Greece. Mandatory quotas for accepting asylum seekers were then introduced based on a country's population size, GDP Cheap Air Max 1 Shoes , asylum applications and unemployment rate.
However, EU members like Poland and Hungary have refused to accept asylum seekers under the mandatory quota Cheap Air Max Thea Shoes , while Hungary and Slovakia had lodged a complaint against the scheme that was recently rejected by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
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MEXICO CITY, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) -- No country appreciates being turned into a political punching bag.
Mexico has been systematically victimized by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has accused the country of sending rapists to the United States, is planning to build a border wall, and to stop remittances being sent to Mexico. These reasons have all made most Mexicans eager supporters of his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
However, the issue of free trade may become Mexico's largest concern in the presidential race of the United States, a country that has pioneered the global economic model.
Both candidates have openly spoken out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the world's largest free-trade agreement (FTAs) signed in 2015 between 12 countries, including Mexico, the United States, Australia and Japan.
For decades now, Mexico has made free trade a cornerstone of its economic and foreign agendas. It has more FTAs with 45 countries, the most of any nation in the world, and much of its economic development has come from rivaling the likes of China and Vietnam as a manufacturing destination.
Its North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) treaty, signed with the U.S. and Canada in 1994, also anchored Mexico's competitiveness by being arguably the only developing economy in the world with such privileged access to these markets.
The unexpected body swerve away from free trade by both Clinton and Trump may well have Mexico spooked. At a one-day summit with President Barack Obama and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in June, this Mexican preoccupation was made clear.
In his address, Mexican President Enrique Pe?a Nieto said Mexico "is now a country that jealously protects its macroeconomic strength."
For Pe?a Nieto, this strength is based on free trade. "The partnership Canada and Mexico have with the United States is on track to make North America a much more competitive and productive region."
Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" screams of cheap jingoism but it also strikes at a desire to bring jobs back and rebuild America's manufacturing heartland. Interviewed by CNN, Raul Benitez Manaut, a Mexican researcher on North America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said "NAFTA has been heavily criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike for two decades. No matter whether it is Clinton or Trump, it will surely be revised and updated."
"Trump has been very aggressive and put in doubt the future of the TPP, which involves Mexico," he said, adding that Clinton would probably be friendly toward free trade overall, as Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have all been.
However, Benitez Manaut's confidence about this may not be certain. Clinton's track record indicates an openness toward free trade. Her husband was in office when NAFTA was signed and she also supported FTAs between the United States and Oman, Chile and Singapore while in the Senate.
Despite that, she has been markedly careful at towing a line between supporting the idea of free trade yet providing few specifics as to what pro-trade measures she would support.
In an interview with CBS in April, Clinton said that "any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. We have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive. It's got to be really a partnership between our business, our government, our workforce, the intellectual property that comes out of our universities, and we have to get back to a much more focused effort in my opinion to try to produce those capacities here at home so that we can be competitive in a global economy."