The European Union's executive has proposed strengthening the bloc's common asylum rules in response to the chaotic arrival of more than a million migrants and refugees last year that has strained EU cohesion.
The proposal on Wednesday drew swift criticism from the Czech Republic, highlighting deep divisions about how to amend what is known as the Dublin rules, under which people must claim asylum in the first EU state they enter.
That system has left frontline states Greece and Italy unable and unwilling to offer asylum to all arrivals and left many migrants to head north, prompting border closures that threaten the EU's Schengen system of passport-free travel.
A first option presented by the European Commission would add a "corrective fairness mechanism" that would relocate asylum seekers from frontline states to elsewhere in the bloc - a method now being employed on an ad hoc basis.
A second is to create a new system that would ignore where people arrived in the EU and send them around the bloc according to a "permanent distribution key".
"In both cases, asylum seekers will be automatically redistributed between member states," the bloc's Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told a news conference.
"We need a fair share of responsibility and more solidarity ingrained in our system."
Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec responded on Twitter: "The proposal for reform of the European migration policy is based again on implementing compulsory quotas. We have repeatedly said NO to that."
The European Commission said it wanted to come up with legal proposals by the summer after EU states and institutions have given their views on the options.
The proposals appear to rule out maintaining the status quo, despite Prague and some other governments not wishing to see any change in a system under which they now take in very few refugees.
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