‘We need a binding agreement on the binding distribution of refugees according to fair criteria between member states, ‘ Mrs Merkel told the German parliament. The council notes that Greece can lodge fewer than 2,000 people in its reception facilities.
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Despite wrapping themselves up in garbage bags of every kind, the migrants, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, were soaked to the skin.
EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled major plans on Wednesday to force the bloc to share 160,000 refugees and ease the pressure on border states from the worst migration crisis since World War II.
Juncker’s proposals include a possible revision of the EU’s much-criticised Dublin Treaty, under which asylum claims must be processed by the first country where refugees arrive. Thousands of people have been forced to camp on the streets in squalid conditions, and there were repeated clashes as riot police struggled to control huge crowds pressing forward to get on board ferries.
The footage, shot secretly by an Austrian volunteer and widely distributed on social media, showed some 150 people scrambling for bags of sandwiches thrown at them by police wearing helmets and hygiene masks in a fenced-in enclosure inside a big hall. It has criminalised illegally entering the country and damaging state property, including the fence, for which migrants could face up to five years in prison.
Interior ministers from European Union member states are expected to clash at a summit on Monday – with the leaders of Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic already calling plans to introduce mandatory quotas “unacceptable”.
“I had a discussion with him today and his mandate is to declare that there is no way Romania will agree to the obligatory quotas“. She said: “Their integration will certainly take place in part via the children, who will learn German very quickly in kindergarten”.
Mr Juncker said asylum applicants should be allowed to work, a issue strongly supported by Fine Gael MEP Deirdre Clune who said that apart from doing the right thing, it also made common sense for a growing country.
Police spokesman Gerhard Koller says the people – estimated by reporters to number more than 1,000 – pushed through police cordons to being their 60-kilometer (40-mile) trek early Friday.
She said that beyond attempts to deal with that, “I can only advise women to learn the language”.
“Now is not the time to take fright, it is time for bold, determined action for the European Union“, Juncker said in his first EU State of the Union speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Some 450,000 migrants have arrived in Germany this year, the pace picked up in the past week. “One could also say a drop in the ocean that won’t solve everything”.
Hungary plans to send back all migrants who aren’t able to prove that their lives were in danger in Serbia even if they file for asylum.
The detention of refugees came as Budapest prepared to deploy its military to bolster its border and stop people from crossing.
Europe was a continent where many had been refugees over the centuries and it was rich enough to cope with a challenge far smaller than the one facing Syria’s neighbors – Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
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The new plans – for an extra 120,000 migrants or refugees – would relocate 60 percent of those now in Italy, Greece and Hungary to Germany, France and Spain.
