EU deadline on refugee pledges misses mark

Asked if the Friday (15 September) deadline would be met and whether he was happy with pledges he had received so far - if any - he said the issue would be discussed at the end this month, when the EU commission plans to unveil new migration proposals.

"Encouraging new resettlement commitments will be part of a new migration package that will be presented later this month," he said.

Avramopoulos's comments follow statements by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in Strasbourg early in the week, where he backed UN calls for an additional 40,000 resettlement spaces in Europe.

"Irregular migration will only stop if there is a real alternative to perilous journey," Juncker told MEPs during his state of the union address on Wednesday.

Juncker had also pointed out that EU states last year had "resettled or granted asylum" to over 720,000 refugees - or three times as many as the United States, Canada and Australia combined.

But the figure raises some questions, in terms of resettlement, given that of the 125,835 resettled refugees worldwide in 2016, only 13,275 found a home in an EU member state. A resettled person is someone in need of protection who is brought to the EU from outside Europe.

EU states avoid Africa

The commission wants EU states to take in more people from places like Egypt, Libya, Niger, Ethiopia and Sudan and had set Friday as a deadline to receive spaces for their arrival.

For the past few years, EU states have trailed behind the rest of the world in terms of resettlements from Africa.

Of the almost 39,000 people resettled from Africa last year, only around 1,800 ended up in Europe. The vast majority went to United States, followed by Canada and Australia.

The UN refugee agency call for extra pledges on top of the EU commission demands announced over the summer.

The commission in July had said that it would pay member states €10,000 for every person resettled, capping the fund at €377.5 million - or enough for 37,750 people.

Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Niger and Sudan are among the priority countries in the commission's grand resettlement campaign.

But while EU states have resettled some 17,000 people since 2015, most do not come from Africa.

Around 8,800 are Syrian nationals coming from Turkey, with others arriving from Lebanon, Jordan and, to a lesser extent, Egypt.

Niger - through which the vast majority of migrants travel to reach Libya - has only resettled one person since 2015. Similar figures are cited for Bukino Faso and Mali.

Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said on Monday that the "response has been very far from adequate."

He noted that only 6,700 refugees along the routes to Libya had been resettled so far this year.