Migrants arrive in a holding area just metres from the Croatian border after walking the last few kilometres from Serbia to Croatia as more migrants continue to arrive by bus on September 21, 2015 in Sid, Serbia | David Ramos/Getty EU forces through refugee deal Countries outvote Eastern European opponents of plan that relocates asylum-seekers.

EU governments on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to relocate 120,000 refugees across the continent, forcing adoption of the measure over the objection of several countries that opposed mandatory criteria for the acceptance of asylum-seekers.

Four countries were strongly dug in against the proposal: Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Czech Republic. But other member states had the votes to pass it, using an EU rule that allows certain decisions to be made without a consensus. Finland abstained from the vote, diplomatic sources said, and Poland, which had been opposed to quotas, sided with the majority.

Interior ministers from the EU's 28 countries held an emergency meeting in Brussels Tuesday to approve the proposal, which was left on the table after they failed to agree on it a week ago. Diplomats had spent most of Monday and part of Tuesday trying to break the impasse between countries over whether the plan would set mandatory quotas for accepting refugees.

“We would have preferred to have an adoption by consensus but we didn’t manage to achieve that,” said the Council meeting's chairman, Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. Some countries, he said, had “their own legitimate points of view.”

Eastern European countries remained opposed to any plan that included a requirement from Brussels to take in asylum-seekers. Now they will have to do so under EU law.

The decision sparked a strong reaction from the governments that were opposed to it. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico told his parliament's EU affairs committee, "As long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory."

The pressure to move on the refugee issue has been building throughout the past week, leading ministers to use the political "nuclear option" of qualified majority voting to adopt the relocation scheme. The voting mechanism is common for less-controversial measures, but has never been used for something as sensitive and divisive as refugee relocation.

On Wednesday, EU leaders will gather for an emergency summit on the migration crisis, and officials pushed to have the relocation dispute settled before then so they can focus on other issues, such as tighter border controls and funding for Turkey, where many refugees are currently being housed in camps.

The East-West split shown in the vote by ministers is certain to make the discussion around the leaders' table a difficult one. “There will be some damage control for European unity” at the summit, said one Central European diplomat.

But EU officials said the decision was an important step forward.

”It is not going to solve the crisis but without it we could have not taken the next steps…on foreign and development policies,” said Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s first vice president, in a press conference after the meeting.

The agreement adopted Tuesday will relocate the 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy, but not from Hungary as originally proposed by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech earlier this month.

Members of the Visegrad group, which brings together leaders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, met Monday afternoon in Prague to discuss “possible solutions” to the refugee crisis. After the meeting the countries reiterated their opposition to mandatory quotas.

But Poland shifted away from the other Visegrad countries, indicating it was ready to take refugees though it remained opposed to mandatory quotas imposed by the Commission.

“We are prepared to accept migrants but not quotas,” said Poland's interior minister, Teresa Piotrowska, before the meeting in Brussels Tuesday.

Despite the split, the mood in Tuesday's meeting was "civilized," said one diplomat, "with no finger-pointing" — in contrast to the heated arguments that dominated a summit on the issue held by EU leaders in June.

“The Eastern Europeans knew since the beginning of the meeting that this was the outcome,” said one EU diplomat.

Front-line states

The scope of the migration problem was underlined this week when the EU released new figures showing that more than 210,000 asylum-seekers applied for protection in the Union in the second quarter of 2015. Those numbers do not take into account the thousands of refugees now arriving daily at Europe's borders.

Both of the Commission proposals now left out of the new agreement — the inclusion of Hungary in the relocation plan and the criteria for distributing refugees across member states — have faced fierce resistance in recent weeks.

After changing its line several times, Hungary refused to be considered as a front-line state for the arrival of refugees, along with Italy and Greece, and in draft conclusions being worked on Monday by the Council it had been removed from the plan.

The original Commission proposal was to relocate 54,000 migrants from Hungary, 50,400 from Greece and 15,600 from Italy. The problem for diplomats was to decide what to do with the 54,000 refugees that Hungary is now refusing to relocate.

According to the decision these 54,000 will be proportionally relocated from Italy and Greece unless the Commission in the next 12 months offers a different proposal for another country — possibly also Germany.

“Germany could ask for it but whether we will do it or not is another question,” Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, told reporters after the meeting.

Under the agreement, in “exceptional circumstances” a member state that is exposed to a sudden inflow of refugees can ask for a temporary suspension of up to 30 percent of applicants allocated to that nation.

'Voluntary'

An earlier agreement on the Commission's proposal from May to relocate 40,000 refugees required a delicate compromise making the target figure mandatory but the method for reaching it voluntary. That less-ambitious agreement was finalized last week by ministers, but the headline goal has still not been reached.

To sidestep the mandatory versus voluntary problem, this time the number of refugees each country will take in has not been imposed by the Commission but rather agreed by the various member states.

“Numbers have been roughly agreed with each member state, so [sovereignty] is safe,” one EU diplomat said.

“The fact that in many cases the number of refugees to take in is very similar to the numbers proposed by the Commission is a pure coincidence,” noted another EU diplomat.