BERLIN // German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande on Monday called for a “unified” response to the worst refugee crisis to hit the EU since the Second World War.
Ms Merkel, whose country expects a record 800,000 asylum applications this year, said Germany and France also wanted all EU members to conform with existing refugee policies governing the bloc “as quickly as possible”.
The German leader said she and Mr Hollande were also in agreement that the EU must draw up a “unified” list of safe countries of origin to which asylum-seekers arriving in the bloc would be quickly returned.
“We must put in place a unified system for the right to asylum,” Mr Hollande said before their meeting, calling the influx from the world’s crisis zones “an exceptional situation that will last for some time”.
Germany has been pushing for such a policy given the large portion of its asylum-seekers – 40 per cent – coming from the Balkans.
Berlin argues that to help those from war zones such as Syria, Iraq and some regions of Africa, it needs to be able to filter out “economic migrants” more quickly.
Ms Merkel reiterated that registration centres must be set up at the first ports of call in Greece and Italy to be administered and staffed by the EU as a whole by the end of the year.
“We cannot tolerate a delay,” she said.
Mr Hollande underlined France’s solidarity with Germany in calling for a “fair distribution of asylum-seekers” within Europe as well as “the dignified return of people entering illegally”.
“There are moments in European history in which we face an exceptional situation – today, it is an exceptional situation but an exceptional situation that will last for some time.”
Meanwhile, thousands of exhausted migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa crossed on foot on Monday from Macedonia into Serbia on their way to Western Europe in a new human wave surging through the Balkans.
The rush over the border followed Macedonia’s decision to lift the blockade of its border with Greece, after thousands of migrants stormed past Macedonian police who tried to stop their entry by force.
Nearly 10,000 migrants, including many women and children mostly from Syria, crossed into Serbia over the weekend. Hundreds more entered Macedonia from Greece on Monday.
They are trying to reach Hungary, a member of the EU’s open-border Schengen agreement, which has already registered over 100,000 asylum seekers this year and plans to finish its anti-migrant fence on the Serbian border by the end of August.
EU border agency Frontex said last week that a record 107,000 migrants were at the bloc’s borders last month, with 20,800 arriving in Greece last week alone.
Austria’s foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, who had travelled to the Macedonia-Greece border, called for an urgent new strategy to deal with the crisis.
“It’s a humanitarian disaster, a disaster for the European Union as a whole, and there is a pressing need for us to focus on the situation in the western Balkans,” said Mr Kurz.
In Rome, Italian officials said the coastguard had rescued 4,400 migrants from 22 boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday alone in what was understood to be the highest daily figure in years.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
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