While four countries initially voted against agreeing to take a named number of refugees from the front-line Italy and Greece over the next two years, they said they would take their share in the end. The crisis, he said, is a test of Europe’s “humanity and responsibility”.
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“The most urgent question we should ask ourselves tonight is how to regain control of our external borders”, Tusk told reporters hours before a summit begins in Brussels. “This means today we’re talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands”.
UNHCR called for the immediate creation of facilities in Greece combined with the expansion of those already present in Italy, so that people arriving by sea from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya can be efficiently received, assisted, registered and screened upon arrival.
Ahead of the meeting, the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation bloc, proposed an extra 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in funds.
But those efforts appear to have failed, leaving European Union member states to force through a majority vote against the wishes of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, while Finland abstained.
Mr de Maziere said the deal also aims to cut “secondary migration” in which people move from one country to another within Europe.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said pushing through the quota system had “nonsensically” caused a deep rift over a highly sensitive issue and that, “as long as I am prime minister“, Slovakia would not implement a quota.
In the latest admission of the country’s excessively generous policy towards the migrant crisis, he said: “We can not accept all the people who are fleeing conflict zones or poverty and want to come to Europe or Germany”.
EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos had warned that the bloc faced an “existential crisis”.
Asselborn said pointedly that he expected all countries, including the objectors, to abide by the decision, as expected under the rules of European Union membership.
At this moment, the railway Horgos-Reske, at the border between Serbia and Hungary, is the only place where refugees can cross the frontier after the government in Budapest erected a fence in order to prevent their passing.
Battles over burden sharing played out on Tuesday, with Germany halting train traffic from Salzburg in neighboring Austria, the European Commission pleading for a “comprehensive solution”, and EU-member Croatia shutting a highway crossing on the border with non-member Serbia, its enemy in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990s.
This way, people entitled to refugee status could take part in the relocation programme under discussion, while those not considered refugees could be “sent back to their countries of origin in a way that respects their dignity,” he said.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the United States plans to issue up to 100,000 refugee visas a year starting in 2017 – up from the current 70,000.
