No priority for Christian Iraqi refugees: EU presidency

By Ingrid Melander

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - The European Union rebuffed German calls for specific measures to help Christian refugees from Iraq on Friday, insisting that decisions on asylum could not be based on religion.

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble urged European countries last week to provide shelter to Christians among the some two million refugees who have fled to Iraq's neighbors to avoid ethnic strife after the 2003 war.

Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU, insisted that religion could not be a precondition in asylum decisions.

"International standards are such that they do not permit differentiation on the basis of religions or race," Slovenian Interior Minister Dragutin Mate said after EU interior ministers discussed the issue at a meeting in Luxembourg.

"That is the basic reason why I am afraid it will be very hard to work in that way," he had said earlier in the day, when asked if Christian refugees should be given priority.

Mate said ministers had agreed to discuss at their next meeting in June how to help all minorities in Iraq, with no discrimination on the basis of religion or race.

Writing in Bild am Sonntag newspaper last Sunday, Schaeuble, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) party, raised specific concerns about the plight of Iraq's Christian refugees.

"We must help here and offer them a home in European countries until they can return to their home," Schaeuble wrote.

On Monday he said he would be happy to take in other religious minorities too, while stressing that most religious minorities in Iraq were Christians anyway.

"We all agree that regarding Iraq, religious minorities and Christians are 99 percent the same," he told reporters. "The situation of the religious minority (in Iraq) is dramatic."

German Integration Minister Maria Boehmer, also a CDU member, echoed his call, saying this week: "It is a human imperative that we quickly help the persecuted Christians (from Iraq) and take them in to Germany."

Iraq's small Christian minority has tried to keep out of the sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. But Christian clergy and churches have been targeted repeatedly in the past few months and many Christians have left the country.

The Archbishop of Mosul of Iraq's largest Christian denomination, the Chaldean Catholics, was kidnapped in the northern city in February and found dead two weeks later.

Scores of grieving Christians packed a Baghdad church earlier this month for the funeral mass of a priest slain by gunmen.

(Reporting by Ingrid Melander; editing by Tim Pearce)