Migrants form a makeshift camp as they wait for asylum under the Greece-EU deal | Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP via Getty Images EU to set Greece deadline on asylum seekers Transfers of asylum applicants to Greece were suspended in 2011 because it wasn’t looking after them properly.

The European Commission will set Greece a deadline on Thursday to fix its migration system and resume taking in asylum seekers from March next year, which would put an end to its six-year-long exemption from the EU's "Dublin rules" on asylum.

Under an agreement signed in the Irish capital in 1990, member countries which are the first point of entry for people seeking asylum in the EU have an obligation to process their application, and take them back if they have traveled on to other EU countries without authorization. Transfers from other EU countries to Greece were suspended in 2011, however, after the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights ruled that conditions in Greek facilities for asylum seekers were unacceptable.

A new 17-page proposal from the Commission, set to be adopted on Thursday and obtained by POLITICO, says: "It is recommended that the transfer of asylum applicants to Greece ... should be resumed."

Forcing Greece to assume its responsibilities is part of a wider effort to reduce controls at many of the EU's internal borders that were reintroduced in response to the refugee crisis, causing the temporary suspension of Schengen, the passport-free travel zone. Countries that reimposed border controls, such as Austria, Germany and Denmark, are likely to only remove them if they can send back asylum seekers to the country where they first set foot in the EU.

The current state of the Dublin system will be on EU leaders' agenda at their summit in Brussels next week. Prior to that, their interior ministers meet on Friday to discuss arrangements for dealing with asylum seekers, as well as a controversial Commission proposal for a permanent relocation system in the event of unusually high levels of refugee arrivals.

The Greek government has its work cut out if it is to respond to the Commission's request for a report by mid-February on improvements in the standard of accommodation for asylum seekers and the management of the asylum process.

"In terms of quality, many of the reception facilities in Greece still fall short of the requirements," says the Commission document, adding that there are particular problems on the Aegean islands, where reception centers "are not only overcrowded but have substandard material conditions in terms of sanitation and hygiene."

"Moreover, overall coordination of the organization of reception in Greece appears to be deficient," it says.

Greece will have to guarantee that asylum seekers are treated in full respect of EU law, but given the deficiencies in the Greek asylum system there will still be an exemption in the case of "vulnerable applicants" such as unaccompanied minors, the document says.

Commission officials said Brussels will also unveil plans on Thursday to help Greece to "de-densify" the islands, including a request for other EU countries to accelerate the relocation procedure and take at least 2,000 migrants from Greece by the end of December. That would be double the number of relocations in November, according to Commission data.

Brussels has also agreed an action plan with Athens to help "alleviate the pressure on the islands" by speeding up the "still too slow pace of returns" of asylum seekers to Turkey under an agreement between the EU and Turkey reached earlier this year.

So far, only 748 migrants have been returned from Greece to Turkey under that arrangement, according to one EU official. The total rises to 1,187 when including migrants returned to Turkey under a separate bilateral readmission agreement.

As for the funding that the EU promised Turkey in return for taking back migrants, new data shows that the bloc has so far allocated €2.2 billion of the initial €3 billion it committed to help Turkey cope with the cost of Syrian refugees on Turkish territory, while only €677 million of that money has been disbursed, much to Ankara's discontent.

"The Commission is making all necessary efforts to ensure an acceleration of disbursements," an EU official said.

Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.