Tensions flared on Tuesday after European leaders agreed to redistribute 120,000 migrants across the continent. An emergency summit will be held in Brussels, Belgium, Wednesday to discuss details of the plan.
The migrants will arrive in Europe in a 20-day period, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, yet the number agreed to exposes the deep division between member countries on how to handle Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.
The plan for each country to take in a certain number of refugees will help countries that have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees such as Germany, Italy and Greece; but it was opposed by Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Finland abstained.
The political atmosphere at the summit “has become pretty toxic,” the BBC reported. European Council President Donald Tusk urged leaders to focus on policies that will help each other, rather than blaming member nations.
“We will soon realize that the emperor has no clothes. Common sense lost today,” Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec tweeted after the Brussels meeting Tuesday. His government warned the quota schemes were unworkable, Sky News reported.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said “as long as I am prime minister,” Slovakia will not implement a quota, reported Sky News. On Wednesday, Slovakia announced it will mount a legal challenge to the quota, according to the BBC.
The Tuesday resettlement plan was agreed to by a majority vote of EU interior ministers, rather than unanimous approval, “a rare move for an issue involving national sovereignty,” the BBC reported.
The Wednesday agenda for European leaders includes discussions of how to strengthen Europe’s external borders, and how to return people whose refugee applications fail. Across Europe, only 40 percent of those whose applications fail are booted from Europe, the BBC reported.
Leaders also plan to discuss how to tackle the refugee crisis at its root, particularly Syria, which has more than 5 million displaced people. Just one-third of the $8 billion pledged for refugee relief in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan has reached aid agencies there, the BBC reports, and leaders plan to discuss Wednesday whether the governments of the countries closest to the Syrian crisis can be funded to do this work directly. There is also some talk of discussing whether Syria’s civil war can be ended politically, reports the BBC.
Almost half a million people have entered Europe this year, fleeing wars and persecution in the Middle East and Africa. Thousands have drowned in perilous and dangerous attempts to cross the Mediterranean, and many are taken advantage of by human smugglers.
The European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, has floated the idea of an EU coast guard, because the Mediterranean is one of the major entry pathways for refugees.
Europe’s leaders have changed positions on the crisis. Germany at first pledged to take 800,000 refugees, but then swiftly enacted border controls when approximately 20,000 refugees arrived. Hungary authorized its soldiers to use rubber bullets, tear gas and grenades to establish order at its own chaotic border. It also built a 13-foot barbed wire fence across its 109-mile border, a decision that was widely denounced.
Croatia revealed Wednesday that 44,000 migrants have arrived since last week after Hungary completed the fence, the BBC reports.
The United Kingdom has not agreed to Tuesday’s relocation scheme, but instead promised to take 20,000 Syrian refugees from the Middle East over five years, according to the BBC.
