Austria to press ahead with daily asylum cap despite European Union rebuke

Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, could be in the hot seat Thursday evening (18 February) when European Union leaders discuss migration issues over dinner at their summit in Brussels.

“I don’t like that”, commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said of Austria’s decision to limit asylum applications to 80 daily and to cap refugee transits to Germany at 3,200 daily.

Austria had been due to host a pre-summit meeting between Turkey and 11 EU states on Thursday, but that was called off due to a bombing in Ankara – a setback to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hopes of pressing ahead with the EU-Turkey pact.

Vienna aims to more than halve the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country to 37,500 from the 90,000 who arrived there past year.

On Saturday 396 people, many of them families and including some elderly people, entered at the main Spielfeld border crossing point with Slovenia in southern Austria, police said.

Migration is at the top of the agenda at crunch talks over Britain’s future on the European Union tonight, with David Cameron locked in negotiations with other leaders over migrants’ access to benefits.

Sweden said it plans to house almost 1,800 migrants on a luxury cruise ship, as it struggles to cope with its share of the huge migrant influx into Europe.

Austria’s interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said the country plans to extend border controls to Italy as it plans for possible shifts in migrant inflows to the country.

Detective Superintendent Hannu Pietila says the Helsinki Police Department, which has organized flights for returning migrants for more than a decade, is ready to continue similar chartered flights between the two countries to meet a growing number of returning Iraqis.

Instead, she told parliament on Wednesday that Europe should work with Turkey to improve the lives of Syrian and other refugees there.

“We need…to say to people that this is a temporary residential status and we expect that once there is peace in Syria again, once IS (Daesh) has been defeated in Iraq, that you go back to your home country with the knowledge that you have gained”, she said. “Last year alone we received more than 20,000 migrants in Denmark”, said Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

An earlier meeting with Turkey’s prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu was cancelled after he chose not to travel to Brussels following Wednesday’s bomb attack in Ankara.

So far, hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing wars and poverty were transported to the borders of each of the Balkan countries where they were separately screened and given temporary asylum documents before continuing their journey.

He also insisted authorities will clamp down on migrants who try to prolong their stay in Germany on false pretences, including those who launch spurious legal claims despite being found to have travelled their illegally.