EU leaders to meet over migrant crisis

European Union leaders will hold an emergency summit where they will try to patch up divisions over the migration crisis.

Brussels - European Union leaders could promise billions of euros in new funding for Syrian refugees at an emergency summit on Wednesday where they will also try to patch up bitter divisions over the migration crisis.

Meeting for dinner a day after interior ministers overrode furious objections from four eastern states in a vote that will distribute asylum-seekers around the bloc according to mandatory national quotas, government leaders will try to focus on ways to curb the inflow of migrants that has hit records this summer.

But feelings are running high as chaotic crowds and varied responses from national capitals have seen borders close inside Europe's cherished passport-free Schengen zone and diplomats expect “theatrics” from some of the 28 leaders as each seeks to shore up domestic support in the face of fears of immigration.

“Today ... a concrete plan must finally appear in place of the arguments and the chaos we have witnessed in the last weeks,” said European Council President Donald Tusk, who will chair the 28 leaders' first full EU summit in three months.

On a day when the Greek island of Lesbos saw 2 500 people land in dozens of dinghies from Turkey, Tusk said arrivals that already exceed half a million this year were likely to increase and that Europe must “regain control of our external borders” or risk destroying the Schengen system and the “European spirit”.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels before the summit, he forecast an agreement for more help for refugees who stay in the Middle East, via funds for UN agencies, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and others. “Frontline” states like Greece and Italy should also get help on their frontiers.

Around the Council table, German Chancellor Angela Merkel may face criticism of her move last month to take in more Syrians, an action some of her eastern neighbours say fuelled the inflow. Even Tusk, a former Polish premier, said without naming Merkel that most refugees “feel invited to Europe”.

Re-elected Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi will hear calls from the north to use new EU support - both in money and manpower - to tighten controls on the bloc's Mediterranean frontiers.

Establishing a principle of “relocating” some asylum-seekers has been a key demand of Rome in particular, which wants to end a rule that states they should remain in the first EU state they enter. Northern countries accuse Italy and Greece of undermining the Schengen area by simply letting migrants move on unchecked.

Eastern opposition

Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, can be expected to offer a typically robust defence of the razor-wire fencing he has erected to keep out migrants and his view, shared in some other ex-communist states, that Muslim immigration is unwelcome.

His Slovak ally, Prime Minister Robert Fico, said he would challenge in EU courts Tuesday's rare majority-vote decision to impose quotas on states for taking in up to 120 000 asylum-seekers, mainly from Italy and Greece.

“We have been refusing this nonsense from the beginning, and as a sovereign country we have the right to sue,” Fico said.

However, many leaders and the EU officials organising the summit - which will not take formal legal decisions - are keen to put the row over “relocation” behind them for now.

Collectively, national leaders may be chided by Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU's chief executive whose Commission named 19 countries, including Germany, France, Greece, Italy and Hungary though not Slovakia, for breaches of EU asylum laws.

States face EU court fines if they do not fix problems that include failure to properly accommodate people claiming asylum - Greece was singled out for particularly serious shortcomings.

“One of the reasons why the asylum system isn't working is because member states do not apply it,” Juncker's deputy, Frans Timmermans, told a news conference.

Border controll

Turkey, locked in a long love-hate relationship with Europe and through which the bulk of the summer's migrants have reached Greece, may hear promises of up to 2 billion euros to help build schools and provide for the welfare of the 2 million Syrians it has accommodated from the civil war.

Johannes Hahn, who deals with the EU's neighbours as a member of the executive Commission, said on Wednesday that a trust fund established to help Syrian refugees across the region, including in Jordan and Lebanon, could reach 1 billion euros on a mix of pledges from the EU and the member states.

The Commission, among proposals adopted at its weekly meeting on Wednesday, also called on them to reverse cuts in their funding for the World Food Programme.

Overall, Juncker said, the EU had doubled the funds targeted to deal with migration to 9.5 billion euros ($10.6 billion).

Noting plans to install “hot spots” on the Mediterranean where seconded EU officials will document arrivals and try to speed the deportation of those not qualifying for refugee status, Commission First Vice President Timmermans said:

“The most urgent thing we need to do is to make sure we can fingerprint and register everyone who arrives so that we can make a distinction between those who potentially have the right to asylum and people who are migrants who don't.”

Reuters