High commissioner for refugees Antonio Guterres says mass relocation programme needed to help people fleeing war and persecution

The UN high commissioner for refugees has called on the European Union to admit up to 200,000 refugees as part of a mass relocation programme that would be binding on EU states.



António Guterres said the EU was facing a defining moment and must “mobilise full force” towards a common approach to the migration crisis.

His intervention came as David Cameron confirmed that the UK will provide settlement for thousands more Syrian refugees, while the former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks said Europe was being tested “as it has not been tested since the second world war”.

Cameron said the British government would “act with our head and our heart” in response to the crisis and refugees’ suffering. He was expected to give further details of his plans later on Friday at a press conference in Madrid with the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy.

Refugee crisis: UN says Britain will take 4,000 more Syrians – live updates Read more

Meanwhile, thousands of people remain outside Budapest’s main railway station in what has in effect become Europe’s newest refugee camp. Hungarian authorities on Thursday appeared to trick hundreds of people into taking a train to a refugee camp outside the capital in an attempt to end a two-day standoff at the station.

On Friday hundreds of frustrated refugees who had been stuck at the Keleti train station for days began gathering up their belongings, vowing to make their way to Vienna on foot. Most later returned. Separately, Hungary shut its main border crossing with Serbia after about 300 people escaped from a nearby refugee camp.

Hungarian politicians are preparing to debate tough new anti-immigration measures, including criminalising illegal border crossings and vandalism to the new anti-immigrant razor-wire fence erected along the Serbian border.

In a statement, Guterres, who has been UN high commissioner for refugees since 2005, said: “Europe cannot go on responding to this crisis with a piecemeal or incremental approach.

“No country can do it alone, and no country can refuse to do its part. It is no surprise that, when a system is unbalanced and dysfunctional, everything gets blocked when the pressure mounts.

“This is a defining moment for the European Union, and it now has no other choice but to mobilise full force around this crisis.

“The only way to solve this problem is for the union and all member states to implement a common strategy, based on responsibility, solidarity and trust.”

Hungarian police and refugees in standoff after train returns to camp Read more

He added: “People who are found to have a valid protection claim in this initial screening must then benefit from a mass relocation programme, with the mandatory participation of all EU member states.

“A very preliminary estimate would indicate a potential need to increase relocation opportunities to as many as 200,000 places.”

EU foreign ministers were due to meet on Friday to discuss the continent’s refugee crisis, of which the Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, whose body was found face down in the surf on a Turkish beach on Wednesday, has become a searing symbol.



Aylan’s mother and brother also drowned when the boat they were travelling in capsized. On Friday his father, who survived the crossing, took the bodies back to the family’s hometown of Kobani, near the Turkey-Syria border, for burial.

Guterres’s appeal tallied with a call by France and Germany for binding EU quotas to share the burden of the influx of migrants and refugees, which has hit Greece, Italy and transit countries in south-eastern and central Europe the hardest.



A European source told Agence France-Presse that the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, would next week unveil a plan for the relocation of at least 120,000 more refugees.

Downing Street officials acknowledged on Thursday that Cameron had been moved to act by the scale of the crisis, as well as the change in the public mood brought to a head by the publication of pictures of Aylan.

However, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, struck a hard line on Friday, saying the flow of migrants into Europe was endless and if the EU did not protect its borders, tens of millions more may come.

“The reality is that Europe is threatened by a mass inflow of people, many tens of millions of people could come to Europe,” he said. “Now we talk about hundreds of thousands but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this.

“All of a sudden we will see that we are in minority in our own continent,” he said, urging Europe “to show strength in protecting our borders”.

There was confusion at Keleti rail terminus in Budapest on Thursday when passengers boarded a newly arrived train they hoped would take them to Austria or Germany. Instead, the train stopped in the town of Bicske, outside the capital, where riot police were waiting to take the refugees to an overcrowded facility that many had left a few days earlier.

AFP and Reuters contributed to this report

