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No compromise in sight, EU ministers at odds over immigration

19 November 2016 00:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. European Union interior ministers were at odds on Friday over how to handle immigration, with heated discussions between states who want more burden sharing and those who oppose any kind of obligatory relocation, APA reports quoting Reuters.

"We are looking for compromises but at the moment they are not there," said Thomas De Maiziere of Germany, which last year took in about 900,000 migrants and refugees.

The ministers disagreed over a proposal by the EU's current chair Slovakia on reforming the bloc's asylum system, which collapsed last year as 1.3 million refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa reached Europe and member states quarreled over how to handle the influx.

Overall, the arrivals have decreased from last year but they continue unabated in Italy and tens of thousands of people are still stuck in Greece and Italy, sometimes in dire conditions.

Despite agreeing last year to relocate 160,000 people from Italy and Greece, eastern European countries, including Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, have refused to take any in.

"We cannot pretend that the quotas as we know them now are working," said Robert Kalinak of Slovakia.

"The 160,000 is only a very small part of the million that came to Europe last year and we only relocated less than 10,000 people. Even those who were for this system were not successful.

We want to come up with a system that would be effective."

Germany is backed by Sweden, Italy and Malta in pushing for obligatory relocation in the asylum reform. That is precisely what the eastern countries are opposing.

They propose instead to offer more resources to police external borders or take on more responsibility for deportations under what Bratislava dubbed "effective solidarity".

"We should never leave the frontline member states in coping with this very, very complex situation," the bloc's migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said. "Solidarity in all the languages of the EU has the same meaning."

"Solidarity must be effective in reality, not just in words."