Frontex

In a recent announcement by the European Commission, significant progress has been reported in the joint efforts to safeguard the external borders of Bulgaria and Romania. The EU's support has yielded promising outcomes, particularly in the areas of migrant returns, asylum procedures, and countering smuggling activities.

The EU will vote Wednesday on a vast overhaul of its immigration policies that would notably harden entry procedures for asylum-seekers and require all the bloc's countries to share responsibility.

The European Parliament will decide a series of laws forming the bloc's migration and asylum pact, based on a European Commission proposal first made in September 2020.

In a bid to bolster border management and migration control, the European Commission (EC) has announced its decision to allocate 85 million euros to Bulgaria and Romania.

The European Union's border agency Frontex said on Thursday it will triple the number of its officers in Bulgaria from next month to help stem the amount of people crossing into the bloc from Turkey.

Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, is set to bolster border security in Bulgaria by dispatching between 500 and 600 of its personnel to the country, announced the agency's director during a visit to Bulgaria. The move aims to address migrant pressure and enhance border protection along the Bulgarian-Turkish and Bulgarian-Serbian borders.

The European Union's administrative watchdog called Wednesday for a change to Europe's search and rescue rules following an inquiry into last year's sinking of a rusty fishing boat, the Adriana, carrying hundreds of migrants while traveling from Libya to Italy.

Greek authorities on Tuesday located 57 migrants and recovered the bodies of two individuals on a rocky shore along the northeastern coast of Lesvos in the eastern Aegean. One person was said to remain missing.

There is a significant increase in the number of illegal border crossings in the EU for 2023, totaling around 380,000, with a rise in arrivals from the Mediterranean Sea. This was announced by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency ("Frontex").

Two migrants were killed and 30 were rescued in Greece on Wednesday after a dinghy crashed into rocks in high winds on the island of Lesvos, local authorities said.

The incident occurred near the resort town of Thermi on the east of the island, facing the nearby coast of Turkey.

The Austrian government has specified five prerequisites for potentially lifting checks at Schengen land borders for Bulgarian and Romanian citizens, as detailed in a statement released after the European Council's decision to open air and sea borders for both countries on December 29.