The European Union looks poised to find broad political agreement on a new EU migration pact. German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that the 27 member states might be able to adopt the new legislation before the end of the year.
According to some NGOs in Serbia, the number of migrants gathering on the Serbian border hoping to make it on to Western Europe are increasing.
Hungary's Viktor Orban, Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babis shot down the EU's planned migration reform ahead of scheduled talks. The Visegrad group rejects asylum seeker quotas.
There have been mixed reactions to the new EU pact on migration. The European Commission sought consensus ahead of the pact in order to pass the policy into law even through countries which had been resisting the idea of mandatory quotas. Many human rights organizations though have slammed the proposals.
In 2015, Angela Merkel opened Germany to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war — sparking heated debate about asylum policy within the European Union. In Brussels, DW's Bernd Riegert asks what lessons have been learned.
Austria has begun testing drones on its borders to Hungary and Slovenia. Equipped with live-tracking and heat-sensing cameras, the drones will be used to detect the movements of smugglers and irregular migrants.
On Tuesday, July 7, a Hungarian court sentenced four migrants to one year in jail each. The court judged they entered the country illegally by tearing down a fence at the border.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has called on Hungary to withdraw a new law that will see asylum seekers turned away at the border. The agency says the act could breach international and European laws.
Hungary is depriving migrants of their right to ask for asylum, an advisor at the European Court of Justice said Thursday. He argued that significant parts of Hungary’s migration and asylum policies violate EU law.
After the EU's top court ruled that Hungary had been illegally detaining asylum seekers, the government announced it was scrapping transit zones. Hundreds of asylum seekers will now be moved to reception centers.
The EU's highest court has ruled that Hungarian authorities circumvented EU law by holding Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers in prison-like conditions. It also said Budapest was obliged to reconsider their applications.
On Thursday, a top official at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) branded the accommodation housing asylum seekers on the Hungarian-Serbian border ‘detention.’ The statement by the advocate general is non-binding and a decision will be reached by the court at a later date.