Slovakia: Successful states have 'moral duty' to migrants

Slovakia's president said Thursday that successful EU states such as his own have a "moral duty to help" those fleeing war and poverty, an idea opinion polls show a majority of his countrymen oppose.

Andrej Kiska appealed to legislators in the Slovak parliament for a way to help the world's displaced population, which the United Nations said Thursday had soared to a record 60 million.

"How can we express basic human solidarity?" asked Kiska, a self-made millionaire-philanthropist turned politician.

"I personally think that we have the possibility, and as a successful country also the moral duty, to help."

While the president said a quota system proposed by the European Commission to distribute refugees among EU member states "was not the right solution", he did not propose an alternative.

An opinion poll released this week showed that 70 percent of Slovakia's 5.4 million citizens do not want to take in refugees or migrants, a sentiment echoed by most of the EU's 28 member states.

Slovakia's southern neighbour Hungary drew criticism Thursday after it ordered work to start along the length of its 175-kilometre (110-mile) border with non-EU member Serbia to halt an influx of migrants, most of whom are headed further west.

But Hungary took in more refugees per capita than any other EU country apart from Sweden last year, recording 43,000 arrivals.

More than 100,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe by sea from North Africa over the last year.

Nearly 2,000 have died during the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in unsafe vessels run by people-smuggling gangs.

EU members are also lukewarm about the European Commission proposal for quotas to redistribute 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum-seekers who have arrived in Europe and to resettle 20,000 Syrians living in camps outside Europe.

Lithuania said Wednesday it will resettle up to 250 Syrian refugees, migrants and asylum seekers transferred from Italy and Greece.

Italy has been applying pressure to other EU nations to resettle their share of migrants and refugees arriving on its shores.

But at a meeting on Tuesday, European interior ministers failed to reach an agreement on carrying out the quota proposals.