Interior Minister, Päivi Räsänen. Photo Lehtikuva
Finland will accept 500 Syrian refugees next year as the government decided Friday to increase the refugee quota for 2014 by 300 persons, according to a press release of the Ministry of Interior.
In addition, the Ministry of the Interior made a decision that 200 places of the standard quota of 750 will be allocated to Syrian refugees. Finland wants to participate, as part of the international community, in alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
A picture taken on August 28, 2013, shows Janda Hussein, a 29-year-old woman from Damascus carrying her two-year-old daughter at Bulgaria's shelter for clandestine migrants near Lyubimets, as the small EU state finds it hard to cope with an ever rising number of Syrians fleeing conflict at home. Over 3,100 clandestine migrants -- half of them Syrians -- have crossed into Bulgaria from neighbouring Turkey this year, doubling their numbers compared to 2012 and and causing Bulgaria's few temporary accommodation facilities to overflow. Photo AFP-Lehtikuva
"Although Finland faces its own economic difficulties, we must be ready to help those in the middle of extreme human suffering," said the Interior Minister, Päivi Räsänen who presented the draft decision to the government.
The Syrian refugees will be accepted in accordance with the standard quota procedure together with the UN Refugee Agency UNCHR. Because of the extensive refugee crisis in Syria, UNHCR has appealed on several occasions for states to offer help in the refugee crisis in addition to providing humanitarian aid.
Syrian-Kurdish refugee families queue to get food at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, 20 kilometres east of Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on August 29, 2013. Over 1.9 million Syrians in total have fled their homeland, mostly to neighbouring Arab states and Turkey, since the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad erupted in 2011. Photo AFP-Lehtikuva
The scale of the crisis is overwhelming, and for this reason UNHCR hopes that states can take exceptional measures going beyond their normal measures to help refugees.
The conflict in Syria began nearly two and a half years ago now and has claimed the life of approximately 100,000 people. According to UNCHR, more than two million people have fled Syria, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA has estimated that the number of internally displaced persons is more than four million. With the crisis continuing, the number of refugees is expected to increase further.
