United Nations official warns European Union on ‘hotspot’ migrant triage

The Chancellor pledged that Austria would enhance bilateral cooperation with Greece for the management of the refugee influx.

The European Union is caught in a delicate balancing act, wanting to encourage Turkey to better control its borders amid continued criticism of the abuses of the Kurdish minority there and attacks on the media and justice system.

Tusk said that “according to Turkish estimates, another 3 million potential refugees may come from Aleppo and its neighborhood”.

Zsolt Nemeth, head of the Hungarian parliament’s foreign relations committee, said his country is working jointly with the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia to help protect Hungary’s border with Croatia, which is also an external border for the EU’s passport-free Schengen travel zone.

“We have to respect commonly agreed rules”, he said, adding that when countries say they intend to flout the laws “they undermine the essence of solidarity and our community”.

Afghan refugees gather around a fire to warm themselves from the early morning cold, after spending the night at a resting point, after arriving on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, Tuesday, October 6, 2015.

Faymann and Greece’s Alexis Tsipras are due on Lesbos around mid-day Monday and are to tour the reception centre set up to register and process refugees and migrants. Over 470,000 migrants have arrived in Greece and Italy this year alone.

A few 550,000 migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe since the beginning of this year, mostly via Turkey, Greece and the Balkan countries. He said it should be a “priority to finance camps in the region of Syria, so that people have the possibility to have their human rights within the region”.