EU interior ministers meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss Europe’s worsening refugee crisis, as long traffic queues formed on the Austrian-German border following Berlin’s decision to temporarily introduce border controls.

German police said they had detained about 30 smugglers and 90 refugees overnight. A traffic jam nearly four miles long was reported on Monday morning on the A3 motorway between Linz in Austria and Passau in Bavaria. There were shorter queues on the A8 near the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall and the Austrian city of Salzburg.

Some train services between Austria and Germany resumed on Monday after being suspended at 5pm on Sunday. Austria temporarily shut its road crossing with Hungary after 7,000 refugees crossed overnight into the border town of Nickelsdorf.

Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, said the country’s military would be deployed to help police deal with the influx of migrants on the border with Hungary if needed.

Refugee crisis: Germany reinstates controls at Austrian border Read more

It was unclear to whether the temporary measures set out by Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, would stop the flow of refugees into Germany.

Speaking in Berlin on Sunday, he said only EU citizens and those with valid travel documents would be allowed to enter the country. He said the German government took the decision after its regions said they could no longer cope with the overwhelming numbers.



It appeared, however, that Syrians with passports could still enter Germany and claim asylum. Hundreds more refugees were expected to arrive in Munich’s main train station later on Monday, German media reported. Before rail services were shut down, about 20,000 people had arrived at the station over the weekend.

Germany’s new controls came ahead of what was expected to be a bitter showdown at the EU summit in Brussels on Monday. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and other eastern European leaders insist that they will not accept a plan set out last week by the European commission chief, Jean-Claude Juncker, for mandatory refugee quotas.

Germany, Austria and France support Juncker’s proposal, which would see 160,000 people shared out across all 28 EU states. They would be allocated on the basis of a country’s size and wealth. The UK, Ireland and Germany are exempt from the EU’s common asylum policy.

On Sunday Faymann suggested that if no consensus was reached in Brussels, Germany and its allies could try to force through a vote on quotas with a qualified majority.

‘Passports, please’: first Syrians halted after Germany restarts border control Read more

He said Austria and Germany, both net contributors to the EU budget, would consider sanctions against countries that refused to share the burden. Measures could include axing some EU structural funds from which “eastern European states profit most of all”, he said.

The UN high commissioner for refugees urged the EU to implement an urgent relocation programme to spread refugees among all EU countries.



The British prime minister, David Cameron, has made clear that the UK will not participate in the plan.

On a visit to a refugee camp in Lebanon on Monday morning, Cameron said British aid totalling £1bn had discouraged hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the Syrian civil war from risking their lives to travel to Europe. He has previously said the UK would take in 20,000 Syrians, but only from camps in the region.

Germany’s temporary reintroduction of border controls was seen as a serious blow to the survival of the Schengen agreement, under which 26 European countries, mostly in the EU, have no border controls and operate a joint asylum policy.

Ukip’s leader, Nigel Farage, said: “By shutting the border with Austria, it is clear that the German government have realised the scale of their error. Schengen surely can’t survive now.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Syrian holding his baby swims towards Lesbos after their dinghy deflated 100m offshore at the weekend. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

David Miliband, who is visiting the Greek island of Lesbos, criticised Britain’s response to the crisis. The former UK foreign secretary, who is now head of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said that Cameron’s commitment to take in an average of 4,000 Syrian refugees a year meant he was offering to house the number arriving on the beaches of Lesbos every day.

“The EU has an opportunity to move beyond its fragmented and lacklustre response to date and finally acknowledge the severity of this humanitarian crisis,” he said. “Each country needs to shoulder the burden and agree to both relocate refugees who have reached the continent and resettle the most vulnerable from the Middle East.”

Greek authorities said on Sunday that 34 people had drowned, half of them children, when their wooden boat capsized in the Aegean sea. The incident happened before dawn off the Greek island of Farmakonisi. The Greek coastguard pulled 68 people from the water, and another 30 managed to swim ashore.