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European countries hastily act to cope with refugee crisis

Source: Xinhua | September 5, 2015, Saturday | Online Edition

AS the overwhelming refugee crisis continuously intensified, European countries scrambled to take actions against the chaotic situation.

Just days after Italy, Germany and France locked horns over the way the European Union(EU) was handling the growing refugee crisis, countries joined together to call for a major overhaul of the asylum process for the 28-nation bloc.

In a jointly written letter signed by Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni along with his German counterpart Frank Walter Steinmeier and France's Laurent Fabius, the three ministers cast a new light on what they called the "shortcomings" of the existing European Union asylum system.

They also said all European countries should share the burden of accommodating the refugees in a "fair" way.

That put an extra burden on southern European countries like Italy and Greece, which are close to North Africa and Turkey, respectively, and which have long coastlines that make it easier for refugees to touch land.

Those two countries also happen to be the two most indebted countries in the European Union relative to the respective size of their economies.

The EU's current asylum rules date to 1990, and they obligate the country where a refugee arrives to register, process, and determine the validity of the asylum request for the new arrival. Each country's asylum rules could differ from those of its neighbors.

If the EU as a whole follows the lead of Italy, Germany and France, it could spark major changes: the three countries, along with Britain, are among the four largest economies with the four largest populations among the 28 EU states.

But adoption of the kind of EU-wide policy is not guaranteed since several EU states have refused to take in their share of the rising tide of migrants.

The Hungarian government has offered some 100 buses to transport refugees to the border crossing, who have just got permission from Austria and Germany to travel to their countries, Hungarian News Agency MTI reported Saturday.

The government's Central Operative Corps has sent buses to the Eastern (Keleti) Railway Station to transport the refugees, who were walking along the M1 motorway towards Vienna, to the Austrian border, said Janos Lazar, minister in charge of the prime minister's office.

Lazar said it was vital to prevent Hungary's transportation systems from becoming paralyzed in the next 24 hours, since the halting of international trains and restrictions on motorway vehicle traffic to keep the refugees safe was drastically slowing traffic.

National police chief Karoly Papp upped the estimate of the number of refugees walking on the motorway to 1,200, adding that another 300 people were walking on the tracks of the main rail line to Vienna, which meant having to halt all trains.

So far, some 2,000 Hungarian refugees have arrived in Austria, whose Chancellor Werner Faymann has called for a special EU summit over the ongoing refugee crisis to be held in September.

"Everyone who comes must have the chance to be recognized as an asylum seeker and to be given living quarters -- that counts for all European countries," he said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron visited his Spanish counterpart Mariano Rajoy in the Spanish capital of Madrid on Friday to discuss the crisis of refugees from Syria.

"Asylum requests this year are triple than they were last year," Rajoy said, adding that "the quota issue will be reassessed later this month...Spain is constantly giving asylum to people...and we are going to meet our commitments."

Cameron was more forthcoming over what Britain would do: "given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of the people, today I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees," he said.

He said Britain would also "provide a further 100 million pounds (US$151.7 million)" in aid.

60 million pounds (US$91.02 million) of this additional funding will go to help Syrians still in Syria, with the rest going to neighboring countries such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, where Syrian refugees now account for one quarter of the population, added Cameron, whose government will announce more details next week.

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