EU Wants Spain to Become Third Biggest Recipient of Refugees in Europe

The European Union will ask Madrid to take in some 15,000 refugees in accordance with new EU migrant distribution system quotas, local media reported Monday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — This number will represent about 12 percent of the 120,000 asylum seekers that the European Union proposes to distribute throughout the EU states.

Such a share will make Spain the third biggest recipient of refugees after Germany and France, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The Spanish authorities said that the country had already received about 17,000 asylum applications this year, which is more than twice the amount received in 2014, but that this fact would not limit Spanish solidarity with the refugees, the newspaper added.

Europe is experiencing a large-scale migration crisis, as hundreds of thousands of refugees attempt to enter the European Union, fleeing their war-torn countries of origin.

In order to tackle the crisis, the Commission has proposed to introduce a mandatory quota system to distribute migrants to all EU member-states according to demographic and economic criteria, but the move has been met by stiff opposition from several EU states.

In May, the European Commission called on EU member states to help host some 40,000 asylum seekers who had arrived in Italy and Greece, proposing a quota plan to relocate them throughout the bloc.