Turkish and European Union leaders have gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit on tackling Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War Two. The EU has pledged more than Three billion dollars to Turkey in return for housing migrants and stemming the flow.
Last year, more than a million entered the EU illegally by boat, travelling mainly from Turkey to Greece. Some 13,000 are stranded on Greece’s border with Macedonia as European states seek to restrict entry.
NATO is expanding its naval mission against people-smuggling in the Aegean Sea to cover Turkish and Greek territorial waters, and will also increase its co-operation with the EU’s border agency Frontex in the region.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte met their Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu, at the Turkish embassy in Brussels late on Sunday to prepare for the summit. The 28 EU states are expected to ask Turkey to take back thousands of migrants who do not qualify for asylum.
