“We must apply the brakes step by step”, Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters.
Advertisement
But the EU’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said that “Austria has a legal obligation to accept any asylum application that is made on its territory or at its border”.
Austria’s daily cap, which was announced by Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner on Wednesday, has met with a wave of criticism from the EU.
The Czech Republic’s prime minister says he is ready to work to achieve an European Union deal with Britain on reforms at the European Union summit this week, but not at the expense of his country’s citizens.
Austria started to implement a new cap on migrants on Friday, allowing in only 3,200 refugees a day from countries at war.
Austrian Defence Minister Hans Peter Doskozil told journalists that a “European solution” must continue to be sought, even as his country took its own steps on the migration crisis.
Central European countries said Wednesday they would push for further border restrictions in Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone unless they see results from Turkey cutting from the present number of around 1,500 to 2,000 a day.
“We are preparing Plan B not because we want it, but because the implementation of a European solution is too slow”, Austrian Chancellor Werner Merkel told the Oesterreich newspaper Tuesday.
Police chiefs of Austria, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia have agreed to transport migrants directly from the Greece-Macedonia border to Austria.
“Everyone’s asking themselves the question; what do we do when we’ve put things in place but they’re not working?” he said. Over a year, that is 20 percent below Austria’s maximum of 37,500 for 2015, but Mikl-Leitner said the relatives of successful asylum seekers also needed to be factored in to the annual total.
But, relative to its smaller population, Austria has taken a similar number of asylum seekers to Germany, and concerns about the influx have fuelled a rise in support for the far right in both countries.
Merkel got EU leaders to hold another refugee crisis summit around the same time, seeking a breakthrough a week before three German state elections in which polls show the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party gaining at the expense of her Christian Democratic Union.
In 2015, over a million people reached Europe’s shores – almost half of them Syrians fleeing a civil war that has claimed more than 260,000 lives.
Since November only refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq have been allowed to cross the border on their journey to western Europe and this year more than 80,000 refugees have been registered entering Macedonia.
“Austria announced them on the eve of the summit and they will enter into force on the second day of the summit”, the official noted, adding, however, that they did not come as a surprise.
Advertisement
Ahead of Thursday’s full gathering of the EU’s 28 members in Brussels, Merkel and Faymann had been due to host talks with nine other European Union leaders and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
