Refugee children trekking to Europe alone in growing numbers

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk addressed the European Parliament on the region’s refugee crisis.

“We are facing a problem of exceptional gravity”, Juncker said during a debate on the migration crisis in the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Croatia’s police said yesterday that more than 13,000 migrants had arrived from Serbia in the past 24 hours.

Juncker confirmed that the Commission will carry out country-by-country analysis to assess the actual impact of the migration crisis on national budgets, but did not clarify which euro zone state may benefit from more leeway.

The influx of people has overwhelmed countries along the migrant trail up from Greece through the Balkans, and sparked concern that the EU’s cherished “Schengen” system of borderless travel is under threat. An additional 50,000 refugees will be sheltered elsewhere along the Western Balkans route.

Last month the European Union approved a plan to accommodate 120,000 migrants and refugees across its 28 nations, but the EU’s newest members in eastern Europe have resisted calls to share the burden.

“But also very important is to help Syria’s neighboring countries, where there are around 4 million refugees”, said UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch. He asked finally for decisions taken to be materialized.

There were other positive signs: Slovenian State Secretary from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Boštjan Šefic, said that his country’s cooperation with Croatia is improving after a week of tension along their shared border.

Save the Children said in a statement Thursday that more than 70 children, including seven on Wednesday night, have drowned in the attempt to reach Greece since Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background whose image made global headlines, was found dead on a beach.

“I am convinced that we won’t get anywhere if we just point the finger at each other, transit countries against countries further down the line, Greece against the western Balkans, the western Balkans against Germany and Austria”, he said. “Refugees. Pursued. The prime minister of the Jewish state doesn’t close his heart nor his borders when people are escaping their pursuers, with their babies in their hands”.

Temperatures are dropping across but the number of refugees pouring over borders to seek asylum remains steady. He described the goal of having fully operational hotspots in Italy and Greece by end-November as “ambitious” and said it would need a “significant acceleration of manpower and assets” to the EU’s Asylum Support Office (EASO) and its Frontex border agency.

But officials said it will take time for Greece to create these facilities and to finish setting up five “hotspot” processing centers to register and identify refugees and migrants.

On Monday the Commission awarded €5.9 million to help Athens in coping with the flux of migrants.