EU refugee plan under fire as ministers try to break deadlock

A plan to share out refugees across the European Union was rejected outright by the Czech Republic on Tuesday and criticised by a United Nations agency for not going far enough. Hours before a meeting of EU interior ministers to discuss the proposal, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said his country would reject any quota system for redistributing 120,000 refugees across the 28-nation bloc. Nearly half a million people fleeing war and poverty, two-fifths of them from Syria, have crossed the Mediterranean this year to reach Europe, overwhelming the EU’s southern states and plunging them into furious rows over border controls.

This is the worst I’ve ever known things in more than 20 years dealing with European affairs.

One unnamed EU official

Amid bitter recriminations between member states, EU leaders want to focus at an emergency summit on Wednesday on ramping up aid for Syrian refugees in Turkey and the rest of the Middle East and tightening control on the bloc’s frontiers. After a failed interior ministers meeting last week, it is clear that the dissenters, notably Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, can be out-voted. But diplomats said they were working to find consensus to avoid such an outcome, arguing that on such a sensitive issue it could further poison relations in the bloc.

A relocation program alone, at this stage in the crisis, will not be enough to stabilise the situation.

UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming

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