Brussels, Belgium | AFP | Thursday 9/17/2015 - 12:20 GMT
by Danny Kemp and Lachlan Carmichael
EU leaders were to stage an emergency summit Wednesday on boosting aid and tightening borders to tackle the migration crisis, but a growing east-west split over a deal to relocate 120,000 refugees threatened to poison the talks.
Hours before the meeting, Hungary's prime minister rejected Angela Merkel's "moral imperialism" over the worst such crisis since World War II while Slovakia said it would dispute the refugee quota deal in court.
Despite Croatia reporting a record number of arrivals and countries across the region feeling the strain from refugees from war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, EU leaders appeared as divided as ever.
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia voted against the relocation plan, arguing the EU has no right to override national sovereignty and make them accept people from overwhelmed frontline states.
"The most important thing is that there should be no moral imperialism," Hungary's hardline leader Viktor Orban said during a visit to the southern German state of Bavaria when asked what he expected from Merkel.
EU President Donald Tusk will hope to move on from the 120,000 refugee relocations, which is just a faction of the 500,000 migrants who have come to Europe's shores and the estimated four million on Syria's borders.
In response to the spiralling crisis, at the summit Tusk will ask leaders to address issues including strengthening the union's external borders, amid concerns the EU's internal passport-free zone is under threat.
Aid pledges
Greece was expected to come under particular pressure to accept EU help to strengthen its borders, being where most of those fleeing across the Mediterranean initially land.
Tusk, the former Polish premier, will also press EU leaders to offer more aid to affected countries outside the bloc including the Western Balkans and Syria's neighbours Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Ahead of the meeting, the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation bloc, proposed an extra 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in funds.
Orban has proposed a three-billion-euro fund for dealing with the crisis but it was not clear whether the leaders would discuss that.
With tensions brewing, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos rejected any suggestion that the rare failure to reach a unanimous agreement on the plan did more harm than good.
"On the contrary, it is a victory for the EU and for all member states," Avramopoulos said Wednesday.
Yet Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose country will be made to take 800 migrants under the plan, said he was prepared to break the EU's rules rather than accept the "diktat" from Brussels.
"Slovakia is not going to respect mandatory quotas. We are filing a lawsuit with the (EU's) Luxembourg court," Fico said, quoted by the website of Slovakia's leading SME daily.
- Croatia record -
The scale of the challenge was evident in Croatia, where nearly 9,000 migrants entered on Tuesday alone, a record daily number since they started to arrive a week ago after Hungary closed its borders.
Large number of migrants poured overnight towards the newly-opened refugee centre in the village of Opatovac, in eastern Croatia, before being bussed to Hungary, state-run HRT television reported.
More than 44,000 refugees had entered Croatia from non-EU Serbia in the last week, it said.
In a sign of the problems within the union, the European Commission said it had issued formal warnings to 19 EU states including Germany and France for breaching rules on the treatment of asylum seekers.
"It is about time that member states stepped up to the plate and did what they need to do," European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said.
US President Barack Obama pressed European nations on Tuesday to take their "fair share" of refugees, despite accusations that Washington has done little to address the crisis.
With millions of Syrians forced into camps across the Middle East, tens of thousands crossing Europe on foot and hundreds washing up dead on beaches, America has promised to take in only 10,000 as refugees next year.
That a figure is dwarved by the up to one million Syrian refugees Germany is expecting to welcome this year alone.
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