The European Union is proposing increased humanitarian aid for Greece, where more than 20,000 refugees and migrants are stuck after borders were tightened along the Balkans preventing them from trekking north to wealthier parts of Europe.
The EU executive’s aid and crisis management commissioner will put forward a plan on Wednesday that officials said would allocate 300 million euros ($325 million) this year to helping any EU state, not only Greece, deal with humanitarian crises, and a total of 700 million over the three years to end-2018.
Commissioner Christos Stylianides, who oversees annual foreign aid spending of 1.1 billion euros, will propose funding the new scheme through transfers within the EU’s existing multi-year budget, officials said, without touching funds earmarked for humanitarian relief outside the 28-nation bloc.
