The European Union aims to rehouse thousands of asylum seekers from Greece in the coming months, officials have said as EU ministers wrestled with concerns about the legality of a new plan to force migrants back to Turkey.
Dimitris Avramopoulos, the member of the executive European Commission who handles migration, told reporters on Thursday at a meeting of national interior ministers that at least 6000 people a month should be relocated to other member states under a scheme that has moved only about 900 hundred people so far.
Some 35,000 people have been stranded in Greece since Austria and states on the route to Germany began closing borders, barring access to migrants hoping to follow more than a million who reached northern Europe last year.
EU officials said that blockage appeared to have made more asylum seekers ask for relocation rather than try to make their own way northward.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, under electoral pressure at home after opening Germany's doors to a million Syrians, has pressed EU partners to share the load, but few are keen.
On Monday, Merkel pushed EU leaders to pencil a surprise deal she brokered with Ankara to halt the flow to Greece by returning to Turkey anyone arriving on the Greeks islands.
But legal details are still being worked out for an EU summit next week and many governments are still sceptical of the scheme.
The top United Nations human rights official said it could mean illegal "collective and arbitrary expulsions".
EU ministers also voiced unease at the price of Ankara's cooperation, notably an accelerated process to ease visa rules for Turks by June and revive negotiations on Turkey's distant EU membership hopes.
Human rights concerns also pose problems for EU lawyers trying to tie up the package by the March 17-18 summit, notably because to despatch people at speed back to Turkey relies on an assessment that Turkey is a "safe" country for them to be in.
An EU definition of such a state includes a reference to the Geneva Convention on refugees, to which Turkey does not fully comply, leaving legal experts in Brussels hunting a solution.
