Berlin, Paris, London seek urgent EU meeting on migrant crisis

Germany, France and Britain made a joint call Sunday for an urgent meeting of European Union interior and justice ministers to find concrete measures to cope with the escalating refugee crisis.

The interior ministers of the three countries "have asked the Luxembourg presidency to organise a special meeting of justice and interior ministers within the next two weeks, so as to find concrete steps" on the crisis, they said in a statement.

The call came after Germany's Thomas de Maiziere, Britain's Theresa May and France's Bernard Cazeneuve spoke Saturday on the sidelines of a meeting in Paris on transport security.

The trio "underlined the necessity to take immediate action to deal with the challenge from the migrant influx".

They also called for reception centres to be set up urgently in Italy and Greece in order to register new arrivals, and for a common EU list of "safe countries of origin" to be established.

Berlin, which is expecting to receive 800,000 asylum-seekers this year, has been pushing for such a list, arguing that it would free up resources to help those fleeing war and persecution.

The number of migrants reaching the EU's borders reached nearly 340,000 during the first seven months of the year, up from 123,500 during the same period in 2014, according to the bloc's border agency Frontex.

Elsewhere on Sunday French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said people fleeing war and persecution must be welcomed.

"Each asylum demand must be examined rapidly," he told members of the ruling Socialist Party gathered in the western town of La Rochelle.

Migrants and refugees who "are fleeing war, persecution, torture, oppression, must be welcomed," he said, adding that the rule should be to treat them with "dignity."

Earlier on Sunday socialist party activists observed a minute of silence in honour of the over 2,000 migrants killed since January in shipwrecks on the Mediterranean.

Valls also quoted a line from a plaque hanging inside the Statue of Liberty in New York which reads: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Valls however underscored that people coming over for economic reasons would be dealt with "firmly."

"Our task is to find lasting responses founded on the values of humanity, responsibility and firmness," he said.