Slovakia and Hungary attack EU refugee plan

Slovakia has launched legal action against a European Union quota scheme to distribute refugees among member states, as Hungary accused Germany of agreeing a "secret deal" to bring up to 500,000 refugees to the bloc.

The central European neighbours restated their opposition to German-led plans to cope with some 900,000 people who have arrived in Europe so far this year, as migrants again clashed with police on the border between Greece and Macedonia.

At emergency EU talks in September, a plan was pushed through to relocate 160,000 refugees around the bloc according to quotas, despite opposition from Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania.

"We demand that the court rules the decision on imposing mandatory quotas is invalid," Slovakia's populist prime minister, Robert Fico, said after his country filed a case at the European Court of Justice yesterday. "I consider the quotas to be nonsensical and technically impossible."

Hardened opposition

Poland

and

Bulgaria

also came out against the quota plan after the November 13th terror attacks in Paris, which stoked suspicion of the mostly Muslim migrants and hardened opposition around Europe to Germany’s “refugees welcome” policy.

Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the second World War has highlighted the bloc’s deep divisions and inability to implement major decisions on a range of measures from boosting border protection staff, to providing cash for refugee agencies, to relocating refugees.

Talks with Turkey

In a bid to reduce the number of migrants arriving on Greek islands, from where they travel through the Balkans to northern and western Europe, the EU agreed last weekend to re-launch membership talks with Turkey and give it €3 billion to improve living conditions for Syrians seeking refuge there.

Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, claimed yesterday that "there's something that doesn't figure in the agreement" that was made public between the EU and Turkey.

“We’ll wake up one day – and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week – that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey,” he said.

Mr Orban, who built fences on Hungary's borders with Serbia and Croatia to prevent migrants entering the country, said Berlin would tell EU states that "we should not only bring these people to Europe but divide them amongst ourselves, as an obligation".

Under pressure from the EU, Balkan states are now allowing only people from conflict-racked Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to move north across their territory, blocking thousands of migrants from other countries.