Germany, Austria, Slovakia call for EU refugee summit

It comes as aid agencies urged the European Union ministers to reach consensus on a plan to share out refugees, saying that failure to do so could lead to further deaths in the Mediterranean,.

BERLIN // Germany, Austria and Slovakia on Tuesday called for a special European summit next week on the migrant crisis, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning that “time is running out”.

Ms Merkel said she and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann had proposed the extraordinary meeting in a phone call with EU president Donald Tusk.

“It is a problem for the entire European Union and therefore we argued for a special EU summit to be held next week,” she said at a joint press conference with Mr Faymann.

“Time is running out, we cannot wait until mid-October” when the next regular EU summit is scheduled, she said.

The problem of admitting refugees could “only be resolved in a pan-European” way, stressed Merkel, whose country expects to take in up to one million asylum-seekers this year.

Ms Merkel said the summit would not primarily deal with national quotas of refugees for EU countries — an idea bitterly resisted by several eastern European members at a ministers’ meeting on Monday.

The German chancellor also distanced herself from the idea of cutting EU funds to member states that refuse to accept their fair share of refugees, proposed by her interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere.

“Threats are not the right way to unity,” she said.

The summit, she said, should look especially at how the EU could help the refugees’ countries of origin, how to help Turkey in handling Syrian refugees, and how it could help EU front line countries such as Greece and Italy manage the tide of arrivals.

Slovak prime minister Robert Fico echoed the call for an EU special summit to deal with the biggest migration crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

However, he made clear his main concern was to resist the idea of nationally binding quotas.

“We demand an extraordinary EU summit at the level of prime ministers and heads of state to discuss the issue of migration,” Mr Fico said from the capital Bratislava.

“In a serious and sensitive matter such as dictating to a country how many people it must accept, when it does not have the opportunity to choose these people, it is definitely a summit that should decide,” he added.

“I will go to this summit with a clear mandate — not to agree with mandatory quotas under any circumstances.

“Mandatory quotas are irrational, wrong and they do not solve anything. We will never support mandatory quotas — never, even if we remain isolated in this matter.”

On Monday, the 28-nation bloc failed to come up with a united immigration policy at a contentious meeting in Brussels.

The ministers did, however, agree to share responsibility for 40,000 people seeking refuge in overwhelmed Italy and Greece and spoke hopefully of reaching an eventual deal on which EU nations would take 120,000 more refugees, including some from Hungary.

The failure of European Union ministers to reach consensus on a plan to share out refugees could lead to further deaths in the Mediterranean, where desperate refugees on sinking boats are already calling hotlines, aid agencies said on Tuesday.

“Decisive agreement is needed without further delay to address the needs, as is bold action based on solidarity from all member states,” Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Twenty-two migrants drowned and 200 more were rescued when a boat capsized in the Aegean Sea off Turkey while trying to reach the Greek island of Kos on Tuesday, the Turkish coastguard said.

* Agence France-Presse, additional reporting from Reuters