Germany, France and Britain have issued a joint call for an urgent meeting of EU ministers to find concrete measures to cope with the escalating migration crisis, reports The Guardian.
A statement from the home affairs ministers of the three countries said they had “asked the Luxembourg presidency to organise a special meeting of justice and interior ministers within the next two weeks, so as to find concrete steps” to deal with the situation.
The three “underlined the necessity to take immediate action to deal with the challenge from the migrant influx”.
The call came after Germany’s Thomas de Maizière, Britain’s Theresa May and France’s Bernard Cazeneuve spoke about the crisis on the sidelines of a meeting in Paris on Saturday on transport security after passengers thwarted an attack on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris.
This month May visited Calais to inspect new security measures aimed at preventing migrants from reaching England via the Channel tunnel. Up to 5,000 displaced people are estimated to be in the French port, with at least nine known to have died trying to make the journey into Britain since June.
Unprecedented numbers of migrants are reaching EU borders, surpassing 100,000 in July alone and reaching more than 340,000 this year so far. Italy and Greece are struggling to cope, while Macedonia has declared a state of emergency.
The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said on Sunday he believed the migrant crisis would push the EU to adopt uniform rules for refugees in place of the current patchwork of laws and approaches.
“It will take months, but we will have a single European policy on asylum, not as many policies as there are countries,” he told the Corriere della Sera.