EU seeks to close key migrant route

 

Turkish and EU leaders have gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit on tackling Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

The EU aims to stem the flow of migrants and plans to declare the route north through the Balkans closed.
It will press Turkey to take back economic migrants and has pledged to give Ankara €3bn (£2.3bn; $3.3bn).
Last year, more than a million people entered the EU illegally by boat, mainly going from Turkey to Greece.
Some 13,000 are stranded on Greece's border with Macedonia.
The human cost of the migrant crisis was brought home again on Sunday when a boat capsized off Turkey with the loss of 25 lives.

EU states remain divided over their response to the crisis with strains showing this year even in Germany and Sweden, seen as the countries most open to refugees.
Anti-migrant parties won a general election in Slovakia on Saturday which saw the far right gaining seats.

'Stand by Greece'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte met their Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu, at the Turkish embassy in Brussels late on Sunday to prepare for the summit.
The summit will be in two parts - the first session will involve Turkey, while in the afternoon UK Prime Minister David Cameron will join other EU leaders in seeking to reach a common approach to the crisis.
The EU is expected to ask Turkey to take back thousands of migrants who do not qualify for asylum. In return the EU will discuss plans to resettle in Europe some refugees already in Turkey.

Medecins Sans Frontieres says children are becoming ill in migrant camps on the Greek border with Macedonia

The BBC's Chris Morris in Brussels says a draft summit communique declares that the route for migrants through the Western Balkans will close.
Last week, European Council President Donald Tusk said he had been told by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his country was ready to take back all migrants apprehended in Turkish waters.
The draft communique also pledges that the EU will "stand by Greece in this difficult moment and will do its utmost to help manage the situation".
"This is a collective EU responsibility requiring fast and efficient mobilisation," it adds.
The EU said last October it would relocate 160,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Greece and Italy, but there was strong opposition among some members and fewer than 700 migrants have moved.
The EU may now overhaul its system that requires asylum seekers to lodge claims in their EU country of arrival, and instead adopt a centralised system for processing applications.
Greek MEP Stelios Kouloglou told the BBC it should not be hard for a continent of 500 million people to absorb one million migrants, but said that in Europe "there is no solidarity. There is no respect of international laws and values".

'All we do is sleep'

More than 2,000 migrants continue to arrive daily in Greece from Turkey.
Macedonia, which aspires to EU membership, is blocking them on its border, now fenced off with razor wire and watchtowers.
A ramshackle tent camp that has grown up around the Idomeni frontier crossing has become the focus of the crisis.

On Sunday, reports from the area said Macedonia had stopped allowing entry to anyone from areas in Iraq and Syria it did not consider to be active conflict zones.
Many migrants in the camp rely on food distributed by volunteers, and items like firewood are scarce.
"We have been here five days, or six - who remembers the days anymore?" asked Narjes al Shalaby, 27, from the Syrian capital Damascus, in conversation with AP.
She is travelling with her mother and two daughters, Maria, five, and Bara'a, 10. Her husband and third daughter are already in Germany.
"All we do here is sleep, wake up, sleep," she said. "We get hungry, we wait in the queue for two hours for a sandwich, we come back, we sleep some more."
Separately, Nato says it is expanding its naval mission against people-smuggling in the Aegean Sea to cover Turkish and Greek territorial waters, and will also increase its co-operation with the EU's border agency Frontex in the region.
The UK has announced that the amphibious landing ship RFA Mounts Bay will join naval vessels from Germany, Canada, Turkey and Greece in the area.
Source:bbc