European Union leaders have defended a migration deal struck during talks in Brussels as doubts emerged about whether they would fulfil their promises to build secure centres for processing asylum claims of people rescued at sea.



The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Europe had made “a step in the right direction” on migration as she prepared to return to Germany to meet her coalition partners ahead of Sunday’s deadline to find a solution to stop flows of asylum seekers arriving from southern Europe.



Shortly before daybreak on Friday, EU leaders ended 10 hours of fraught talks on migration with a vague accord to set up “controlled centres” in Europe to assess asylum claims of people rescued in the Mediterranean.



'Austria is not a first-arrival country, unless people jump with parachutes' Sebastian Kurz

The centrepiece of the deal is an unspecified promise for more EU countries to open “control centres” on a voluntary basis to process asylum claims. But Austria, France, Germany and Italy made clear they had no immediate plans to open secure centres on their soil.

Asked if Austria would open a centre, the prime minister, Sebastian Kurz, said: “Of course not … we are not a first-arrival country, unless people jump with parachutes.”

Nonetheless, Merkel said the overall agreement was more than she had envisaged before the summit and said she believed it surpassed demands laid down by her coalition partners.

Her hardline interior minister, Horst Seehofer, had threatened to close Germany’s borders to migrants, sparking a dispute that some feared would bring down Merkel’s government.



Merkel was due to brief Seehofer’s CSU party on Friday night about the EU deal, as well as about bilateral agreements she had struck with Spain and Greece, which will require the Mediterranean countries to take back asylum seekers who had arrived in their country first before moving on to Germany.



Under EU asylum rules, first-arrival countries are responsible for processing asylum claims, putting a disproportionate burden on southern states nearest north Africa and Turkey.



Italy wants to tear up the first-country principle, but the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he did not want to change the rule, setting the stage for more confrontation over the overhaul of EU asylum rules, a process that has stalled after two years of talks.



Central European countries claimed they had buried the idea of mandatory refugee quotas for all EU countries. “Now everyone has dropped the topic,” said the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, hailing that as a “a big success”.

Donald Tusk, the European council president, told reporters in Brussels that it was “far too early to talk about a success”.

Diplomats were left uneasy about the negotiating method of Italy’s new prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, who pushed the summit to the brink of collapse by threatening to veto the entire summit communique, including unrelated parts on trade.

When Conte, according to a source, told his fellow leaders: “I am a law professor,” the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borissov, replied: “Well, I used to be a fireman and this is not how you negotiate.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, added that he used to be a welder and he did not agree with the Italian’s way of making his point, either.

Borissov described the Italian threat as “unpleasant” but conceded that leaders had at best reached a “fragile consensus that does not solve the whole problem”.

Several EU leaders stressed they wanted to work with international agencies who were willing to set up migrant camps in north Africa to process asylum claims.

However, a paper released by the UN agency for refugees and the International Organisation for Migration on Friday strikes a different tone. They called for “strong leadership from European Union member states on upholding the right to asylum and the rights of migrants”, while stressing that the EU could not outsource the problem. The agencies say they oppose closed detention centres.