New EU migrant plans ready next week: EU

The EU executive will outline new plans next week to share out refugees across European states as well as to speed deportations of unwanted migrants, the 28-nation bloc's migration commissioner said on Sept. 1. 

Dimitris Avramopoulos told Reuters that new EU systems for processing asylum claims in Italy, Greece and possibly Hungary could involve detaining those rejected until they return home, as European governments strain to balance obligations to provide refuge with hostility among the public to mass immigration. 

In an interview, Avramopoulos said the Commission would put new proposals to interior ministers at an emergency meeting on Sept. 14, five days after Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is expected to outline plans to the European Parliament during his annual state of the Union. 

That timetable represents an acceleration in response to a surge in arrivals over the summer while member states argued over how to spread the load. Avramopoulos said his discussions with governments gave him hope they would drop objections to a distribution system for asylum-seekers that Juncker put forward in May and would next week present as a permanent EU mechanism. 

"The majority of countries ... want to contribute," he said. "Some countries that were a bit reluctant ... have changed their mind because now they realize that this problem is not the problem of other countries but theirs as well." 

While the Commission was ready to expand on earlier outline plans to deal with the crisis, however, Avramopoulos insisted there would be no change to the Schengen code which has removed border checks on much of the bloc's internal frontiers - despite calls for changes to prevent migrants exploiting that openness. 

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