French President Francois Hollande stated on Thursday that he agreed with Angela Merkel on the proposal for a refugee distribution quota. In the past, France repeatedly refused mandatory quotas for sharing the number of refugees among the countries of the European Union.
Merkel and Hollande announced that their proposal would be sent immediately to the EU institutions in Brussels.
Speaking in the Swiss capital Berne, German Chancellor Angela Merkel underlined that the burden of taking on hundreds of thousands of refugees could not fall on just a few European countries. She called for quotas in order to ensure a fair distribution.
Merkel also argued that the EU’s so-called Dublin rules, which require migrants to apply for asylum in the first EU state they reach, were not working anymore. “So many refugees are arriving at our external borders that we can’t leave Italy or Greece alone to deal with the task,” Merkel said.