Interior Ministers of the European Union's member states on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to share 120,000 refugees across Europe. "Today, European Home Affairs Ministers have taken an important decision to relocate 120,000 refugees from Greece, Italy and other Member States directly affected by the refugee crisis, less than 3 weeks after the Commission came forward with its proposal," European Union said in a statement. "Following this decision, the EU is now in a position to relocate a total of 160,000 people in clear need of international protection in the coming two years."
Eastern European countries Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic opposed the vote saying that the move will affect the fabric of European society, according to Guardian.
"We, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians against, and Finland abstained. The resolution was accepted," Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said after the vote, Irish Independent.
"Slovakia would rather breach the measure than accept such a dictate," Prime Minster Robert Fico stated, saying the plan was forcefully imposed, according to Associated Press. "It's a bad decision, and the Czech Republic did all it could to block it," Czech premier Bohuslav Sobotka said.
The mandatory refugee-quota scheme aims at reducing pressure on frontline E.U. countries - Greece (50,400), Hungary (54,000), and Italy (15,600), as HNGN reported previously. It would allocate asylum seekers to member states according to their capacity to absorb them, to be calculated using the following weightings: population size 40 percent, GDP 40 percent, average number of past asylum applications 10 percent and unemployment rate 10 percent.
