EU leaders are divided over a quota scheme for housing migrants, as they gather for a summit in Brussels.
Summit chairman and European Council President Donald Tusk irritated an EU commissioner and other officials by calling mandatory quotas “ineffective” and “highly divisive”.
His European Council agenda calls for an EU deal by June to ease the burden on Mediterranean countries facing the greatest migrant pressure.
The Visegrad Four members of central Europe – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia – reject the EU’s asylum policy.
The European Commission is suing Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic at the European Court of Justice for refusing to accept asylum seekers under an EU quota system.
The pre-summit agenda sent to leaders by Tusk appeared to back those countries’ objections. They argue that they are ill-equipped to integrate people from non-Christian cultures who would rather live in richer EU countries anyway.
“The issue of mandatory quotas has proven to be highly divisive and the approach has received disproportionate attention in light of its impact on the ground; in this sense it has turned out to be ineffective,” the agenda said.
The European Commission devised a mandatory scheme to relocate 160,000 refugees, Syrians and Eritreans, from Italy and Greece to other EU countries.
So far only about 32,000 refugees have been transferred.
European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos called Tusk’s position “unacceptable” and “anti-European”.
