The EU refugee crisis has been a crisis for cross-border cooperation - stated Raffaele Cattaneo, (EPP/IT), Chair of COTER and Political Coordinator of the EGTC Platform of the CoR, speaking at the seminar on "the participation of the EGTCs in programmes of European Territorial Cooperation" coorganised together with the Association of European Border Regions in the Committee of the Regions today.
The President of the Lombardia Regional Council voiced his concern over the situation with less and less open borders in Europe "The mutual trust built during 25 years of INTERREG experience, and more than 50 years of cooperation is now at serious risk. That is why cross-border cooperation becomes more and more important. We need to involve our citizens and give visibility to our collective achievements".
Cattaneo is eager to hear the outcome of possible responses and solutions, i.e. the proposal of the Council aiming to include the cooperation in asylum and refugees into INTERREG. "The refugee issue could be one of the topics of the annual meeting on the Platform." he proposed.
Today's conference intended to give an overview on the state-of-the-art of the participation of the EGTCs in INTERREG, identifying their main achievements, the bottlenecks, and the future steps to improve their performance. It also aimed to help EGTCs to brainstorm and obtain useful tips in order to successfully apply to the new calls of proposals.
Today's seminar coincided with the Valletta EU Summit on migration.
The EU Refugee crisis will also be topic of the upcoming CoR's plenary session with debates with Donald Tusk, President of the European Council and Dimitris Avramopoulos, Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship scheduled.