Germany Will Push for Compulsory EU Refugee Quotas

Support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives has dropped to its lowest level in more than three years, a poll showed on Sunday, as her allies in the state of Bavaria stepped up criticism of her handling of the refugee crisis.

Most European countries are signatories to the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention and are legally bound to uphold the principle of ‘non-refoulement’- which forbids the rendering of a true victim of persecution to his or her persecutor. The dialogue aims to find out what is important to people in Germany.

However, other European Union states have either refused to take part in allocation schemes, or, like Hungary and Bulgaria, have put up fences around their borders to keep refugees out.

Rights group Amnesty worldwide said the 28-country bloc could not afford to end another meeting without an agreed plan.

Syria’s refugee crisis is nothing new.

“What matters now is delivery”, said Tina Strefela, spokesperson for Slovenian leader Cerar.

While a few European leaders portray the refugee wave as a temporary issue that can be curbed with better border controls, Timmermans said: “The worst thing we could do is to present the picture to people that if we take these measures, the problem will stop”. Officers arrested 11 men and two women whom they said were members of a far-right movement and a criminal gang. Meanwhile agreement appears to be emerging within Merkel’s coalition government for setting up a string of “transit zones” on Germany’s borders to allow would-be refugees who do not fulfil asylum criteria, such as economic migrants, to be moved out easily and quickly. Last Tuesday Slovenia mobilized its army to deal with the sheer numbers of migrants arriving at its borders after Hungary closed its border with Croatia. Merkel said at a town hall event in Nuremberg Monday that “there are very, very many, but there are 80 million of us”.

The leaders of Albania, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have joined EU chiefs at Sunday’s gathering, as well as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres; Fabrice Leggeri, the executive director of Frontex; and European Asylum Support Office Executive Director Robert Viser.

With a population of around 2 million, Slovenia claims to be overstrained by the influx and asked the Commission last week for €60 million over the next six months to aid the handling of refugees. Authorities in Germany have also reported mounting anti-migrant violence.Merkel is said to appreciate the sensitivity and the difficulty of the plans being drawn up and is likely to proceed cautiously in phases.

Tsipras is disappointed that Turkey wasn’t invited to the Brussels gathering, opposes any establishment in Greece of a single site for tens of thousands of refugees and is skeptical about an idea that was floated to use European Union border-management agency Frontex to patrol the country’s frontier with Macedonia, a Greek official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

Clearly, European governments are seeking to deflect from what is their collective responsibility – and failure.