EU leadership steps up efforts to stem migration flows

European Council President Donald Tusk currently was embarking on a shuttle diplomacy, touring some countries on the migrant routes to seek a consensus on handling the ongoing migration crisis.

The busy trip, which started on Tuesday and will last until Friday, was scheduled to take Tusk to Vienna, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Skopje, Athens, Ankara and Istanbul. Tusk also expected the tour to accumulate consensus to prepare for the upcoming EU-Turkey summit on refugee issue on March 7.

"The first priority is to rapidly stem the flows and reduce illegal migration while preserving the integrity of the Schengen area," said Tusk after his meeting in Zagreb with Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic.

Tusk urged in the tour more and better coordination inside the EU. He called on member states of the EU to be prepared to massively step up the assistance to alleviate the humanitarian consequences of EU's decision, saying that it is the shared responsibility that Greece gets the help it needs.

Tusk also appealed to do everything to make the EU-Turkey action plan work and significantly reduce the inflow of migrants to Europe via Turkey.

He will end his trip in Turkey where he will meet both Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Ankara and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul. The two meetings with the Turkish leaders will be important occasions to prepare for the upcoming summit with all the 28 EU Heads of State or Government and Turkey in Brussels on March 7.

"There is no good alternative either to cooperating with Turkey, across which most of the migrants are currently travelling. At our summit next Monday with Turkey, we must do all that we can to make the EU-Turkey joint action plan our common success. It will depend above all on a clear and significant drop in arrivals," said Tusk during the tour.

On Wednesday, the European Commission had proposed an Emergency Assistance instrument to be used within the EU to provide a faster, more targeted response to major crises, including helping Member States cope with large numbers of refugees.

The initiative came as the refugee crisis reaches an unprecedented scale with the need to provide immediate emergency support in several Member States hosting large amounts of refugees on their territories.

According to the Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management Christos Stylianides, with this proposal, the EU will be able to deliver emergency assistance for crises much faster than before inside the bloc.

The Commission will urgently propose, to the European Parliament and to the European Council as the budgetary authorities, an amending budget for 2016 to create the budget line for the instrument.

The estimated needs for 2016 are 300 million euros with a further 200 million euros each for use in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Also on Wednesday, the Commission confirmed the returning of 308 irregular migrants, mainly of Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian origin, would take place from Greece to Turkey on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"This sends a clear signal that those who do not qualify for international protection will be returned," the Commission said.

The return of irregular migrants who have no right to stay in the EU to their home countries or to countries they transited through, is an essential part of the EU's comprehensive efforts to address migration and in particular to reduce irregular migration, it added.

Europe's refugee crisis keeps simmering as clashes erupted in the northern Greek town of Idomeni Monday between the police and hundreds of migrants trying to break through the fence into the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

Meanwhile in France, police started to bulldoze a migrant camp and clear the site in the northern port city of Calais, where about 3,000 migrants were staying, which has led to an angry backlash as pro-migrant activists threw projectiles at the police and the latter used tear gas.

The European refugee crisis, which broke out last year as a result of wars and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa, has shown signs of deterioration after Austria started to impose daily caps on the admission of refugees earlier this year, causing a wave of border closures by the Balkan states over the past few weeks.

Some 129,455 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe by sea since the beginning of 2016, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) revealed Tuesday.

"The numbers still fall short of 2015's total, when over one million sea-borne arrivals were recorded. However, with ten months left, it appears likely that last year's total will be surpassed, possibly before the end of summer," IOM indicated in a statement. Enditem