EU offers Turkey deal on tighter border controls

The deal involves easier travel visas and a possible €3 billion in aid if Ankara, Turkey’s capital, stems the influx of people.

The European money is aimed at helping Turkey to improve conditions for the two million refugees it is hosting on its soil – and keeping them in Turkey.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said talks over the aid would continue with Turkish officials over the coming days.

Turkey will also have to go ahead with a previously agreed deal to take back migrants from Europe who fail to win refugee status in other countries.

“We can not organize or stem the refugee movements without working with Turkey”, said Merkel, who is due to visit Turkey at the weekend for talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the migrant crisis and Syria.

The announcement comes just hours after an Afghan refugee was shot dead by border guards in Bulgaria.

Additionally in Brussels, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron said he’d present four principal requirements in November in the EU.

The Turkish leader also challenged the European Union to take Ankara’s bid for European Union membership more seriously.

“We need guarantees that Turkey’s response to our offer will be as concrete and as substantive as ours”, European Council President Donald Tusk said, adding that Europe faced the possibility of a bigger wave of refugees.

The global Organization for Migration says more than 600,000 asylum seekers have landed on Europe’s shores since January, while more than 3,000 have died or gone missing trying to reach Europe. He added that there were “very significant numbers of people, refugees, in Turkey”.

The European Union leaders welcomed the EU-Turkey joint Action Plan for tackling the crisis, saying its “successful implementation will contribute to accelerating the fulfilment of the visa liberalisation road-map towards all participating member states and full implementation of the re-admission agreement”.

“This is the turning point when Europe is deciding whether it will be marked by walls and barbed wires or whether it will be a reasonable continent of cooperation that uses political means to address the causes of such misery”, she said.

Despite criticism from liberal sources that the European Union was “outsourcing” its border policy, there is growing urgency in Brussels to get a deal in place before the deteriorating Syrian civil war precipitates a new wave of refugees.

Turkey has also called for the establishment of an worldwide “safe zone” for refugees inside northern Syria – but Tusk said Russia’s involvement in Syria made the idea more hard.

Hungary said Friday it would not close its border with Croatia – despite building a fence along the Serbian frontier.

TOPSHOTS An elderly woman is pictured after arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on October 15, 2015. “So the discussion is no longer a discussion of how we share the problem but rather how we do something about the problem”, Rasmussen told reporters after the late-night meeting.