Special Bundestag committee meeting over refugees

Ahead of the special meeting of the German parliament's interior committee on Wednesday, committee head Wolfgang Bosbach of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) said what was lacking in the international response to the refugee crisis was cooperation throughout Europe.

Speaking to national radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Bosbach said that while leaders across the continent use the phrase "European solidarity" in speeches, the concept hasn't been put into practice "in every day life for quite some time."

Bosbach was clearly alluding to the situation in Budapest, where migrants were allowed to freely board trains from Austria and Germany on Monday - in violation of the Dublin Regulation, which says all asylum seekers must be processed in the first EU nation they arrive in - before being removed from Budapest's Keleti train station the next day.

Germany is currently receiving 40 percent of the refugees arriving in Europe every day, according to Bosbach. Together, Germany and Sweden took on more than half of last year's refugees, while eight EU countries accepted under 1,000 of the hundreds of thousands who applied for asylum.

Whoever wants to profit from the structural and economic benefits of EU membership must also help take on their share of refugees, Bosbach said.

Ahead of the meeting, German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) said that at least 1.8 to 3.3. billion euros ($2.02 to $3.71 billion) would be needed to handle the more than 800,000 refugees Germany expects to cross its borders this year.

Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, also warned on Wednesday that the ever-increasing need for refugee homes was also causing the rise of right-wing extremism in Germany. Speaking to "Stern" magazine, Maassen cautioned that "there is a connection between the number of attacks [on refugee centers] and the number of people in the NPD," referring to the right-wing nationalist party of dubious legality.

About-face from Hungarian authorities

The meeting comes a day after chaos in Budapest left hundreds, if not thousands, of migrants stranded in the Hungarian capital after having spent hundreds on tickets to Germany. On Monday, when police allowed migrants free passage on trains heading west, some 3,650 headed to Vienna hoping to make it on to Germany. In the 24 hours between Monday and Tuesday the German state of Bavaria said it recorded 2,200 newcomers, the most ever in a single day.

After authorities shut down Budapest's Keleti train station and forced the migrants to vacate, they gathered outside the building to protest their treatment. The demonstrations continued on Wednesday with more than one hundred migrants gathering outside the station for a second day to demand permission to board the trains.

"Normal people, abnormal people, educated, uneducated, doctors, engineers, any people, we're staying here. Until we go by train to Germany," said a Syrian refugee.

"And this is what we will be doing (protesting) for the next day, for the next month, for the next year and for our whole life. We need our rights... It's not our dream to stay here and to sleep in the streets."

es/kms (AFP, dpa, epd, KNA)