Wants to accelerate deportations

Austria should step up deportations of people who do not qualify for asylum, Chancellor Werner Faymann said in remarks published on Saturday, striking a tougher tone on migrants as he comes under pressure from his conservative coalition partners.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere, have entered Austria, the last country on the way to Germany, since early September.

Only a fraction of those people, swept up in Europe's worst migration crisis in decades, have applied for asylum in Austria rather than continue their journey into Germany, but the country has struggled to provide them with suitable accommodation.

"We cannot pretend that all refugees actually have grounds for asylum," he said in an interview with newspaper Oesterreich, extracts of which were released on Saturday ahead of publication in Sunday's edition. "Therefore we must intensify deportations."

Austria has received 85,000 asylum applications this year, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Austria has said it expects roughly 95,000 applications this year, more than 1 percent of its population, compared with 28,000 registered in 2014.

Source: MENA