European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker presented the following speaking points at the press conference on the Western Balkans Route Leaders’ Meeting:

Today we addressed three main challenges:

1) Providing Shelter

• The immediate imperative is to provide shelter and ensure refugees and migrants along the Western Balkans route are treated in a humane manner. It cannot be that in the Europe of 2015, people are left to fend for themselves, sleeping in fields and wading chest-deep through rivers in freezing temperatures.
• Leaders committed to providing temporary shelter, food, health care, water and sanitation. Where national capacities fall short, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism should be triggered.
• Sufficient temporary accommodation must be ensured along the Western Balkans route – we will increase reception capacities to 100,000 places in Greece and the Western Balkans:
  • I commend Alexis for his commitment to increase reception capacity in Greece to 30,000 places by the end of the year, with the UNHCR to help provide at least 20,000 more places in Greece.
  • And I am particularly grateful to António Guterres, who will ensure the UNHCR lends its full support to these efforts, increasing the provision of humanitarian support to those in need and support the increase of reception capacities by a further 50,000 along the Western Balkans route.

2) Managing the migration flows together

• The only way to restore order to the situation is to slow down the uncontrolled flows of people. The policy of waving through people to neighbouring countries has to stop. I want to be clear: people must be registered. No registration, no rights.
• Leaders meeting today all committed, first of all, to sharing information about flows and, second of all, to refrain from taking unilateral decisions whose effects are inevitably borne by others. To facilitate this, all will appoint by tomorrow national contact points to exchange information and achieve the gradual, controlled and orderly movement of persons along the Western Balkans route.

3) Border Management

• To safeguard Schengen, we also need to strengthen border management
• In addition, we will deploy 400 police officers to Slovenia within a week

The EU and our neighbouring countries have to work together in this. Our partners in the region – all of whom aspire to EU values and standards and have an EU perspective – share this common goal.

I am therefore pleased that we could all come together today, in this European spirit. And I would thank, in particular, Angela and Miro for their initiative and support in making this meeting possible.