While the refugee crisis continues to grip Europe, this week
EU leaders met for an emergency summit in Brussels
to discuss how best to manage the issue. During talks European countries agreed
to donate an extra one billion euros to the UN refugee agency and the World
Food programme, and to strengthen border controls and allow more funding for
border security forces, while also giving more help to Syria ’s neighbouring countries Lebanon , Jordan
and Turkey .
Ultimately though there was a generally mixed reception to the summit, as while
EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker described the talks as ‘excellent’,
there was great division when it came to the mandatory refugee quotas passed on
Tuesday. Slovakia was one of
four European countries to vote against the plan to relocate 120,000 refugees from
Greece and Italy across the European Union, and in protest
to the plan has filed a legal challenge with Prime Minister Robert Fico saying
on Tuesday that the system would not be imposed on Slovakia so long as he’s in office.
This case really serves to clarify that the European Union are far from unified
on the subject of refugees, and it will be some time before the situation is
truly under control – if nothing else though, this meeting was as Angela Merkel
described it “a first step” towards ending this crisis.
This was a brief summary of the week's events surrounding the refugee crisis. It was taken from the TEN: Politics YouTube show, Week in Review.
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