Law enforcement in Europe

Bulgaria's Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has asked the European Commission to help normalize traffic through Greece's border with Bulgaria.

EU member states gave Greece a three-month ultimatum to remedy “deficiencies” in controlling the migrant flow or face border controls with the rest of the Schengen passport-free zone.

Bulgaria's Parliament has adopted on second reading legal changes allowing counter-intelligence and domestic security agency DANS to process passengers' reservation data in the country.

Under the amendments, which were first put forward by the government in September, a special unit in charge of handling the data, in compliance with a EU directive and the Europol Regulation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Saturday for better protection at the extrenal borders of European Union so as to maintain the Schengen zone.

“We need to protect our external borders because we want to keep Schengen,” Mrs. Merkel said in her weekly podcast adding that if EU fails to protect its external borders, the free movement of people would be jeopardized.

"Europe has forgotten that history is fundamentally tragic," said Manuel Valls, the French prime minister. "If Europe can't protect its own borders, it's the very idea of Europe that could be thrown into doubt. It could disappear - not Europe itself, not our values, but the European project, the concept we have of Europe, that the founding fathers had of Europe."

Following a positive opinion by the Schengen evaluation committee on Friday, the College of Commissioners has today adopted the Schengen Evaluation Report on Greece and a proposal for a Council Recommendation on addressing the serious deficiencies identified in the evaluation report on the application of Schengen rules in the field of management of the external borders by Greece.

The EU Parliament is set to discuss migration and to explore options to preserve the Schengen area amidst tensions among member states over the influx of migrants.

Over 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children have disappeared in Europe, the EU police agency Europol said on Jan. 31, fearing many have been whisked into sex trafficking rings or the slave trade.

Europol's press office confirmed to AFP the figures published in British newspaper The Observer, adding that they covered the last 18-24 months.    

The issue of ‘evicting’ any member-state from the Schengen area was neither raised nor discussed, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos said on Friday speaking at the Economist’s ‘The World in 2016 Gala Dinner’ in Athens.

Greek Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas  expressed his concerns on those who have asked the temporary exit of Greece from Schengen area, even thought European Union has not officially stated anything like that.