Migrant crisis as it happened - 2 September 2015

Germany's ambassador to the UK, Peter Ammon, has criticised the number of refugees that Britain takes in. He told the BBC's World at One that Germany was taking too many in comparison.

"Britain has taken in refugees for centuries and I think not to your disadvantage and I think we will expect that all partners will make their best efforts to contribute to the solution of this problem," he said.

Asked how many refugees Britain should take, he said: "I think this is something that has to be discussed among the members and assess that Germany has now taken in 43% of all refugees, we think that this number for Germany is too high."

You can hear the interview here.

More on the call by Italy, France and Germany to review current European Union rules on granting asylum and distributing migrants fairly.

A document signed by foreign ministers from the three states underlines that the crisis has "clearly shown the limits and defects" of the current rules, Reuters reports - and calls for the rules to be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on 4-5 September.

Kevin Ringrose in Symi, Greece:

Living on the small Dodecanese island of Symi, refugees have been arriving in small numbers for many years. But the last few weeks numbers have dramatically risen. To put into perspective Symi has a basic population of around 3,000. At any given time at the moment there can be as many as 500 refugees on the island. In the last couple of weeks a voluntary organisation has been set up to raise funds to provide basic needs for those arriving as well as a building which is used to store and distribute clothes, shoes and even such things as toys kindly donated by locals and holidaymakers.

Corinna van Haastert in the Netherlands:

The leaders of the European countries never ever agree how to handle refugees from war. The problems are now turned into a real crisis because the politicians looked away or waited how others were acting. The only problem (beside housing them) in my opinion is they take their religious conflicts with them. And that will bring more instability in our fragile EU.

Italy, France & Germany have made a joint call for "fair" distribution of refugees in Europe, Italy's foreign ministry says

Migration Aid, who say they are a group of volunteers helping migrants in Budapest, have organised a silent protest in favour of migrants tonight.

On the event's Facebook page, over 7,000 people have said they are attending outside of the city's main train station.  

Iceland has said it may take in more Syrian refugees this year than the 50 originally planned after a Facebook appeal urged it to welcome more people, reports AFP news agency.

"I think we can add [to the numbers] but I can't and don't want to name a figure," Icelandic Foreign Minister Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson told public broadcaster RUV.

To put the figure in context, it represents some 0.015% of Iceland's 330,000 population. The UK reportedly accepted about 10,000 refugees last year - which is also about 0.015% of its population of 64.6m.

This video shows migrants demanding to be let into Budapest's main train station this morning. 

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Our colleagues at BBC Monitoring report that Budapest's mayor, Istvan Tarlos, has said that his main aim is to protect the city from what he described as an "uncontrolled flood".

Hirado.hu, the news website of the state-controlled TV channel M1, quoted Mr Tarlos as saying that while protecting Budapest is the primary concern, "humanitarian considerations" are also being taken into account. The mayor was also quoted as saying that "no-one should seek to make political capital out of the situation".

Images of Czech police officers writing numbers on the hands of migrants are an uncomfortable reminder of a different event and a different era.

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But the Czech authorities appeared totally unaware of the unfortunate visual connotations with the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed with serial numbers.

The police said the priority in dealing with the 200 migrants at Breclav railway station, in the South Moravian region, was identifying them and trying to keep family members together.

This, said a spokeswoman, was a difficult task when many had no documents and did not speak English; hence the numbers in felt-tip pen on their arms.

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Former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who now runs the major aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC), has told the Guardian that Britain needs to accept more migrants and refugees:

"Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK," he said. "The reasons we did so were good in the the 1940s and '50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others."

Quote Message: The view from inside #Keleti stn in #Budapest. Hundreds of #migrants camping out in the underground entrance, blocked by iron bars.

The view from inside #Keleti stn in #Budapest. Hundreds of #migrants camping out in the underground entrance, blocked by iron bars.

EPACopyright: EPA

In this summer's migrant crisis - as with the unfinished debt crisis in Greece and the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine - Germany once again finds itself at the centre of a European drama...

As Germany struggles to find consensus on the migrant crisis, a familiar dynamic is playing out, with Berlin pushing its partners to live by rules that not everyone is inclined to follow.

That tension has, in some sense, made both the Greek and migrant crises two sides of the same problem. The Greeks lived large borrowing in euros, which Germany backed with its sterling credit, and then challenged Germany's demands for harsh austerity when it ran into financial problems.

Similarly, people in the eastern reaches of Europe have enjoyed unfettered access to the big German market. But they have balked at Germany's evolving demands for how to grapple with non-European migrants crisscrossing their lands on their way to seek asylum or work in Europe's wealthier core.

In Britain, acting Labour leader Harriet Harman has said the country should be doing "much more to play our part" in helping to take in more refugees.

She says: "I think Europe as well needs to be much better co-ordinated on this, the European Union - they fixed a meeting to talk about this for 14 September.

"Every day thousands of people are turning up in the Mediterranean, only a few days ago 71 people died, suffocated in a lorry. The idea that they [the EU] set a ministerial discussion in two weeks' time shows a lack of urgency."

Mr Egeland goes on to suggest that a co-ordinated plan across Europe - not just the EU - should allow people to be received with dignity, and would help countries that are the first port of entry.

"Refugees and asylum seekers should be divided among these 40 nations on this continent. We're 40 nations with half-a-billion people and we have trillion-euro economies. We shouldn't panic because we're getting half as many refugees that tiny Lebanon shouldered alone."

The EU needs an entirely new system for assessing the asylum claims of new arrivals, says former UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland.

Mr Egeland, who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, has called for the dismantling of the Dublin Regulation which assigns responsibility for asylum seekers according to the state through which they first enter - and which, he said, was no longer fit for purpose.

That rule, he says, is "making chaos by countries having this indecent tug of war, this indecent race to the bottom in not receiving people and pushing people back, desperate refugees back to the first port of entry in Europe, which may be Greece or some other place that is not able to receive them.

"So the whole thing has to be renegotiated - and urgently."

More grim details are emerging about at least 11 migrants - including several children - who drowned trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Turkey.

The bodies of several of them have washed up near the Turkish resort town of Bodrum.

On the Austria-Hungary border, Austrian police have been performing spot checks in order to stem the flow of migrants being smuggled in.

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A senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc has welcomed the introduction of temporary border controls between Italy and Austria, saying it followed a request from the southern German state of Bavaria, Reuters reports.

"I do not think Schengen is over," said Stephan Mayer, a conservative expert on interior affairs.

"But I certainly see the danger that if it is not possible in the long run to apply European asylum rules, that this directly erodes and endangers Schengen."

Banners welcoming refugees have also been appearing in German football terraces - here's a picture of one, tweeted by football club FC St Pauli

German footballers have been backing a campaign to speak out against racism and xenophobia as thousands of asylum seekers arrive in their country.

Led by captain Bastian Schweinsteiger, a group of players appear in a video holding up signs condemning violence and calling for "respect", "help", "integration" and "fair play" towards any refugee arriving in Germany, reports the AFP news agency.

It is part of a wider pro-immigration campaign that sprang up in reaction to a spate of anti-foreigner rallies, arson attacks on asylum shelters and assaults on migrants in the streets.

Europe's biggest economy expects a record 800,000 asylum applications this year, more than any other EU country.

A senior UN official says that to boost development and stem the flow of migrants to Europe, Africa needs a "Marshall Plan"- like when the US gave billions of dollars to Europe to rebuild it after World War II.

Philippe Douste-Blazy, a former French foreign minister who is now UN Undersecretary General, tells the BBC he has witnessed the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean firsthand, accompanying a search boat, seeing some people rescued and others dying in front of him.

He described the situation as a "human atrocity".

reports that police in Burgenland, eastern Austria, say that since Sunday 700 refugees have arrived in the area, coming over the border from Hungary.

About 240 of them were discovered in lorries and vans, smuggled over the border. The police have arrested 24 people on charges of people smuggling.

The EU should consider a US-style green card lottery to deal with the migrant crisis, argues Dr Jan Semmelroggen, an expert on migration policy and management at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

He writes that no country can solve the current and future migration challenge by itself, and a solution could be to implement a common EU-wide asylum system when migrants would have their asylum claim processed in a member state embassy outside EU territory.

I work for a French telecommunications company and travel frequently to our office in Paris.

I was booked to travel on the 19:13 train from Paris yesterday (Tuesday) evening. Due to delays, we didn't arrive back in the UK until around 10:50 local time this morning.

The experience has been truly awful and it is hard to believe that a serious travel company like Eurostar did not anticipate and put contingency plans. The migrant issues have been going on all summer.

The experience for the families with young children and the elderly has been the most worrying. To leave them on a cold, unlit train without power all night, with toilets not functioning, is disgraceful.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has pledged to take legal proceedings against all those arrested for trying to stowaway on vehicles using the Channel Tunnel.

"Our target is to reduce the number of intrusions to zero," Mr Cazeneuve said on radio Europe 1.

Mr Cazeneuve added that nine people had died this year trying to make the crossing.

About 100 police officers have been sent to Budapest's suburban station of Kobanya-Kispest after a group of migrants occupied a platform there, Hungary's ATV television reports.

The migrants are refusing to move to a registration centre in the city of Debrecen.

Police are quoted as saying the "illegal immigrants" held their children aloft and demanded to be allowed to proceed freely to Germany.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has rejected calls for the UK to accommodate more of the record numbers of migrants arriving in the EU, many from Syria.

He said "taking more and more refugees" was not the answer to the crisis - "the most important thing is to try to bring peace and stability to that part of the world".

Read more of the story here.

Here are some of the images coming in today from across Europe on the crisis.

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

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Eurostar has apologised for delays and cancellations affecting Tuesday night's service due to "trespassers on the line in the Calais area".

"We understand this was a frustrating time for our passengers, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. Our staff have been on hand today and through the night to provide as much support and care as possible to arriving customers and to advise on compensation."

The European Commission has previously failed to persuade member states to accept a mandatory quota system for redistributing migrants who arrive in Europe. It wanted countries to take in 40,000 Syrians and Eritreans over the next two years. Leaders instead agreed to accept 32,500 on a voluntary basis.

But a Commission spokeswoman said today it was preparing proposals for a more permanent system to deal with the influx.

She said: "For each and every crisis... a system would automatically be triggered to relocate a proportion of the people in genuine need of international protection" among other EU member states.

She added that the UK and Ireland would still have a choice to "opt-in" - and Denmark would have an opt-out.

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Twenty-four Afghan migrants were freed from the back of a van in Austria yesterday after the driver fled, leaving them in danger of suffocating.

Police spokesman Thomas Keiblinger told reporters on Wednesday that the vehicle's sliding door had been welded shut and conditions inside were awful.

"The police really came across a terrible situation. The people were sitting on top of each other, standing on top of each other and had no chance of opening the door themselves from inside."

The European Commission is trying to draw up a common list of safe countries of origin that asylum applicants can be sent back to, the BBC's Chris Morris in Brussels reports.

The Commission clearly intends to include places in the Balkans such as Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, which are candidates for EU membership, on the list, our correspondent adds.

Germany says about 40% of the applications it has received so far this year have come from people from the Balkans.

The migration crisis has exposed cracks in what is supposed to be common asylum system across the EU. 

So what are the rules governing immigration to the EU and should the system be restructured to make it fairer to all of the member nations? 

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The BBC's James Reynolds has followed a young Syrian migrant, Nour Ammar, on her perilous journey from Turkey to Sweden to claim asylum. Find out about her nine-day journey, and the challenges she came across here.

Andy Burnham, who is running for leadership of the UK's Labour Party, has accused the British government of a "complete absence of leadership" on the migrant crisis.

Speaking to the BBC, he said he agreed with Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann that Britain's renegotiation of its role within the EU should be blocked unless it accepts more migrants.

His comments come after Yvette Cooper, another Labour leadership contender, said Britain should take in at least 10,000 more refugees from conflicts in Syria and other countries.

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The #refugeeswelcome hashtag has been widely used on social media in recent days and it is still trending on Twitter in Austria today.

It's one part of a movement by people across Europe who argue that it's time to relax rules and let migrants in - particularly those fleeing Syria's war.

The BBC Trending team has taken a closer look at that internet activism, including the thousands of people supporting an Icelandic writer's Facebook plea for her country to take in more refugees.

Hungarian policemen are guarding entrances to the Keleti station in Budapest as hundreds of migrants demand to be let on trains to Germany.

The station was closed to migrants on Tuesday as officials tried to stop them travelling through the EU but many of the migrants had already purchased tickets.

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EU politicians have been struggling to get a grip on the migrant crisis as tragic stories continue to emerge about people dying on the dangerous journey to Europe.

Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has renewed calls for the EU to make it easier for people to apply for asylum closer to their countries of origin.

Speaking to the BBC he asked: "Why is it necessary that these refugees put their feet on European soil to ask for asylum?"

"Why is it not possible to try to help these people in facilities that we establish in the zones of conflict - instead of pushing these people... into the arms of criminal organisations?"

Police in Burgenland in eastern Austria say that since Sunday, 700 refugees have arrived in this area, coming over the border from Hungary.

Around 240 of them were discovered in lorries and vans. They've arrested 24 people on charges of people smuggling.

Last week, the bodies of 71 people thought to be migrants were found in an abandoned lorry close to Austria's border with Hungary.

Thousands of migrants are arriving in mainland Greece as the government prepares for talks on tackling the huge number of people reaching its shores.  

BBC News producer Will Vernon is with some of them in the capital.

A lot happens in one day as record numbers of migrants travel to - and through - Europe. We've taken a look at 24 hours in the crisis, using photos taken on Tuesday.

Here, a baby is helped to board the Norwegian Siem Pilot ship during a rescue mission off the Libyan coast.

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Eurostar passengers who were stuck in a train overnight due to disruption caused by people on the tracks have arrived in London St Pancras station, the BBC's Transport Correspondent Richard Westcott reports.

The aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres has had a busy morning on the Mediterranean, with two of its vessels rescuing migrants trying to get to Europe. 

Patrick Kingsley, who is the Guardian's migration correspondent, is on board MSF's Argos vessel and has been tweeting about today's rescues. 

There has been condemnation online after Czech police reportedly wrote registration numbers on the hands of migrants arrested at a railway station.

The incident, which was reported by Czech news website iDNES (in Czech), happened in Breclav, in the South Moravian Region. 

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Eurostar has asked passengers travelling today to leave extra time for check-in due to disruption caused by migrants trespassing on the train tracks at Calais.

Some people were forced to spend the night in the French port - and services were suspended for more than four hours.

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There have been fresh protests by migrants barred from boarding trains at the main railway station in Hungary to Austria and Germany. Some 2,000 people, including families with children, have been waiting in the square outside Keleti station in the capital Budapest.

Migrants had been leaving the city in huge numbers but Hungarian authorities sealed off the station to migrants on Tuesday, saying they were trying to fufill obligations as an EU member by upholding border controls.

Welcome to our live coverage of Europe's migrant crisis. Follow the latest updates from across the continent as the number of migrants arriving reaches record levels.