PARIS, May 17. /TASS/. The principles of the operation of one single European area must be reviewed "top to bottom," and to this end the European Union member-countries should develop a fundamentally new Schengen agreement that would replace the previous one, said former French President Nicholas Sarkozy who currently heads the country’s leading opposition party, the Union for a Popular Movement.
"It’s necessary to change the conditions of receiving migrants and then to define the conditions of solidarity. We need a Schengen-2," the French politician told his party’s supporters in the south of the country, the AFP news agency reports.
According to Sarkozy, France is a country "open from a geographical point of view." However, the issue of regulating the migration flows is becoming more and more acute for Paris. "Of course, we will not leave people to die in the proximity of France, but one thing is to save somebody’s life and quite another - to create a system in which a fraud becomes a rule rather than an exception and which works to the detriment of French tax-payers," Sarkozy said.