The meeting of the interior ministers of EU member countries in Brussels on Monday brought no progress in addressing the migration crisis and could have been held as a videoconference instead, according to the Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kaliňák. "Everybody says that the hotspots for migrants arriving to Europe don't work, and I'm not happy about being right on this. This situation cannot be fixed by extra or more intensive work. The entire model is ill-thought-out", said the minister. He also pointed to Sweden's efforts aimed at reallocating migrants from its territory as the country is unable to cope with the inflows. 'Hotspots' were created to process migrants in locations with the heaviest flows of arrivals. At these hotpots, arrivals are registered, fingerprinted, and potentially assigned to one of the EU countries that have agreed to accept them.

As far as Slovakia is concerned, Kaliňák said that it will come to grips with the issue of migrant reallocations once migrants are also resettled to countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Portugal and once it shows that those migrants are staying in those countries. The Slovak Government has been opposing any scheme for compulsory quotas for migrant resettlement and has declared it will voluntarily accept only 200 Christian refugees from Syria.





Anca Dragu, Photo: AP/TASR