Thousands of refugees were heading towards Hungary and the EU border on Monday, as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the union’s member states must fairly share the burden of dealing with Europe’s biggest migration crisis since the second world war.



Speaking before talks in Berlin with the French president, François Hollande, Merkel said Europe needed to act together to deal with the chaotic scenes in Greece and the western Balkans as desperate migrants tried to reach the EU. “The current situation troubles us greatly,” she said.

Germany and France are to draft common proposals on immigration and security to deal with the worsening emergency. On Monday, Merkel said they could include building new registration centres in Greece and Italy to be run and staffed by the EU as a whole by the end of the year.

She said: “Time is running out. EU member states must share costs relating to this action.”



The two leaders also said that the EU must draw up a unified list of safe countries of origin. Asylum seekers arriving from these countries should be swiftly returned.

Berlin is increasingly determined to push a new system of mandatory quotas for refugees across the EU despite the issue being rejected by EU leaders in acrimonious scenes. The European commission is also to propose a new permanent system of emergency refugee-sharing across the union.



The Berlin summit came as long lines of migrants travelled on foot and by bus through southern Serbia, on the latest leg of their increasingly desperate journey to western Europe. The UN refugee agency UNHCR said more than 7,000 people, including women and children, had reached Serbia from Macedonia.



Many had spent three days on Greece’s northern border after Macedonia refused to allow them to enter. Last week Macedonian riot police tried to beat back crowds using stun grenades. On Saturday and Sunday the authorities relented and opened the border. They laid on trains and buses to ferry the refugees further north.

At the Serbian border crossing of Miratovac, refugees walked three miles to a reception centre in the southern town of Preševo. Most carried their belongings in rucksacks and men carried small children on their shoulders. In Preševo, they received medical aid, food and papers legalising their transit through the country.

“I just want to cross to continue my journey,” Ahmed, from Syria, told Reuters, speaking on the Serbian border. He added: “My final destination is Germany, hopefully.”



Germany is warning of reintroducing national border controls unless other countries step up to the plate and share the refugee burden more equitably. Proposals from Brussels in May to introduce mandatory refugee quotas across the EU on a small initial scale were rejected by Spain and most of eastern Europe. At their June summit, leaders debated until 3.30am and agreed nothing.

Since then, the number of migrants entering Greece, Italy and the Balkans has soared, with Germany predicting the arrival of 800,000 asylum seekers this year and the figures for the EU projected to triple compared with 2014.

Angela Merkel and François Hollande attend a brief press conference in Berlin. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/dpa/Corbis

The European commission, as the guardian of the Schengen system, insisted on Monday that the free travel area was sacrosanct and would not be changed, but added that national authorities could mount identity checks and other monitoring measures on rail traffic and in problem areas as long as the action did not amount to border controls.

The latest frontline in the EU’s attempts to deal with the problem is Hungary, the first state beyond Serbia inside the Schengen zone. Tighter migration laws officially kicked in this month and the Hungarian government promised to complete a fence along its 108-mile border with Serbia to keep out migrants.

Cutting the fence – due to be completed in its first phase by the end of the month – will be punishable with up to four years in prison. In the Hungarian town of Szeged on the border with Serbia the local mayor has supported volunteers who have given refugees food, water and travel information. Local sentiment, however, is mixed.

The influx represents the biggest movement of people in the western Balkans since the wars in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Speaking on Monday during a visit to the Macedonian capital, Skopje, Austria’s foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, said the countries in the region had been “overrun, overwhelmed and left to their own devices”. “We have to help them,” he added.

With European asylum and immigration policies increasingly a mess and national governments failing to come up with a coherent response to the worst migratory pressures witnessed in many countries, Berlin and Brussels are sounding the alarm.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, said the failure to be more generous and sharing on the refugee issue created a Europe he did not want to live in.

Germany’s social democrat leaders warned that public opinion would turn against the EU if Germany was left with more than one third of those seeking asylum in Europe, while many other countries, mostly in eastern Europe, admitted minimal numbers of refugees.

On Monday it emerged that the German authorities had decided to waive certain EU asylum rules for Syrians without informing Brussels. Berlin’s immigration authority ruled that all Syrians entering Germany would have their asylum claims processed, waiving the right to have them deported back to the first EU country the claimants entered.

A record 50,000 migrants, many of them Syrians crossing by boat from Turkey, hit Greek shores in July. In the past two weeks, over 23,000 have entered Serbia, taking the total so far this year to some 90,000.

“They’re coping somehow so far,” said Ivan Mišković, a spokesman for Serbia’s commissariat for refugees and migration, of the aid workers and authorities on Serbia’s southern border. “Refugees in Miratovac and Preševo are receiving first aid and they are fed before proceeding onwards.”

Meanwhile, Greece’s coastguard is searching for at least five people missing at sea after the dinghy they were using to cross from Turkey overturned off the coast of the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos.

The coastguard said it had rescued six people, had recovered the bodies of two men and was searching the area for the missing. It was alerted after a fishing boat picked up one person off the island’s eastern coast on Monday morning, and a second managed to swim to the island. The two told authorities they had been in a boat carrying about 15 people when it overturned.



Greece has been overwhelmed by an influx of mainly refugees reaching its islands from Turkey. The Greek coastguard said it had picked up 877 people in 30 search and rescue operations from Friday morning to Monday morning near the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos. The figures did not include the hundreds who managed to make it to the islands themselves, mostly in inflatable dinghies.

