Dutch State Secretary Klaas Dijkhoff said that the results of the meeting in Brussels can be described as satisfactory as the EU countries reached an agreement on relocating 120,000 refugees.
Dijkhoff reminded that the Netherlands earlier pledged to relocate 2,000 people who arrived to Europe mostly from Syria, Eritrea and Iraq.
The aggravation of conflicts in a number of Middle East and African countries in 2015 drove thousands of people to flee their homes to seek shelter in Europe. Since the beginning of the current year, more than 378,000 illegal migrants have arrived in Europe.
About 2,800 migrants died while trying to get to Europe. As many as 121,000 refugees have arrived in Italy and about 309,400 — in Greece. Up to 5,000 migrants a day are getting into the European Union via Macedonia and Serbia. They are amassing at the borders of Austria, Hungary and Germany. The latter, which has already received about 400,000 refugees, was the first among the Schengen zone states to impose passport control at the border.
The European Commission has suggested quotas for 160,000 migrants be imposed on each European Union member states. Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the Baltic countries are against such quotas. Experts say the migrant flow to the European Union might exceed one million by the end of the year.
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