Mayor Hřib: Prague Lacks Emergency Accommodation for Ukrainian Refugees

Prague does not have emergency accommodation capacity for possible new refugees from Ukraine.

At the same time, the city’s Security Council is asking the government to create rules for placing additional refugees equally among all regions.

The outgoing mayor of the capital, Zdeněk Hřib (Pirates), says on his Twitter account.

The Regional Assistance Centre for Ukraine (KACPU) in Prague handles several hundred refugees every day. More than 100,000 people have passed through it since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

“The Prague City Security Council met on Tuesday to discuss the current refugee situation and the city’s preparedness for a possible next wave of migration. It noted, among other things, that the emergency accommodation capacity in Prague has already been exhausted,” Hřib said.

In this context, the mayor said, the Security Council is therefore appealing to the government to create a mechanism for evenly redistributing refugees among the Czech Republic’s regions in preparation for a possible new wave.

“By the way, we have been calling for this since March this year. It is also necessary for the government to communicate to the regions a strategy in case of a new migration wave,” the mayor added.

There were two tent cities in the capital, in Troja and Malešice, which offered emergency temporary accommodation to refugees. In the tents, mainly Roma refugees from Ukraine, who originally spent the night at the main train station, found asylum.

Each town offered 150 beds and facilities with amenities. In the summer, the two were merged into Troja and then closed at the end of September.

By the end of the year, Prague City Hall, in cooperation with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), will launch another centre to help refugees from Ukraine, targeting those who have been in the capital for a long time and are dealing with problems such as housing or education.

It will operate in parallel with KACPU in the same building in Vysočany.

KACPU will continue to offer its existing services for newly arrived refugees, of which it currently handles about 200 to 300 per day