“We will start a new era”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said shortly after midnight on the border.
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It follows Hungary’s decision to close its frontier which seems likely to drag new countries into the crisis.
Many may now hope to enter European Union member Croatia and then Slovenia, which is part of Europe’s Schengen zone of border-free travel, and beyond to Austria and Germany.
Authorities launched 46 criminal prosecutions with the court proceedings beginning Wednesday.
Hungary is now only permitting a handful of migrants through – only if they seek asylum.
While the tough new measures have mostly stopped the flow across the border, isolated groups still managed to crawl under or climb over the forbidding barbed wire of the 175-kilometer (110-miles) border fence to enter the EU.
Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands swiftly followed suit, and other countries said they were monitoring the situation to determine whether they need to do so as well. In one spot a carpet still covered three rolls of razor wire. Domestic media reported that the judge ordered the man to be expelled from the country, and forbidden from returning for one year.
Migrants stand in front of a barrier at the border with Hungary near the village of Horgos, Serbia, Sept.15, 2015. “We are feeling hungry and feeling angry”.
The ministers did agree to share responsibility for 40,000 people seeking refuge in overwhelmed Italy and Greece and spoke hopefully of reaching an eventual deal – next month or by the end of the year – on which European Union nations would take 120,000 more refugees, including some from Hungary. Twenty asylum requests are already being processed, the number of illegal border-crossers has already reduced significantly, ‘ Kovacs said.
“What we want is Europe to act in an unified way”, says Baloch.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been arriving at the EU’s southern and eastern edges and making their way to the richer countries further north and west, in the greatest migration to Western Europe since World War II.
More than 100 refugees were seen entering the town of Sid, which sits near the Croatia-Serbia border, by a Reuters camera crew on Wednesday morning.
“They will be able to cross Croatia and we have been working intensively on that”, Milanovic told lawmakers during a regular parliament session.
The migrants were being registered at a border crossing at Tovarnik on Wednesday, a Croatian interior ministry spokeswoman said.
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Romania opposes the European Commission’s proposal for mandatory refugee quotas, saying that it will not take in more than 1,785 refugees and migrants.
