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 Reflecting divisions among member states, the European Commission
offered options for amending what is known as the Dublin rules,
under which people claim asylum in the first EU state they enter.
That system has left Greece and Italy unable and unwilling to offer
asylum to all arrivals and seen many trekking north, prompting
border closures that threaten the EU's hallmark Schengen system of
passport free travel within Europe.
A first option is to create 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".
Longer term, the Commission also proposes centralizing the entire
asylum process within EU institutions, rather than basing it on
national laws - though this is very unlikely to find much support
among member states for the time being.
 "The current system is not sustainable," the European Commission's
First Vice-President Frans Timmermans said in presenting the
proposal.
"We need a sustainable system for the future, based on common rules,
a fairer sharing of responsibility, and safe legal channels for
those who need protection to get it in the EU."
Germany, which took in a million people last year who mostly arrived
initially in Greece, wants to stick to the main Dublin principle of
first point of entry but have a permanent relocation scheme in place
for asylum-seekers. Italy has pushed for the abolition of the
first-country rule altogether.
Britain, which will vote in a referendum in June on whether to quit
the bloc, does not take part in most EU asylum policies.
With no compromise yet in sight, the Commission has shied away from
presenting concrete legal proposals and instead laid out various
options for future changes.
However, the proposals rule out maintaining the status quo, despite
some governments not wishing to see any change in a system under
which they take in very few refugees.
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Different asylum rules in EU states have also encouraged chaotic
flows of potential refugees within the EU as they trekked from the
frontline countries to Germany, Sweden and other states whose laws,
or economic prosperity, offer them the most beneficial conditions.
The Commission outlined legal changes to harmonize asylum rules in
EU states to prevent that in the future. It floated an idea to
introduce legal punishment for irregular movements by non-Europeans
between countries in the bloc and proposed a stronger mandate for
the European Asylum Support Office.
In another plan likely to draw mixed response from EU states, the
Commission said the bloc needed a long-term resettlement scheme to
bring in people into Europe directly from crisis zones to create an
alternative to the current chaotic and dangerous routes.
Separately, the Commission also rolled out on Wednesday a number of
technical proposals to strengthen the bloc's external borders in an
attempt to tackle both the migrant influx and security threats
following deadly attacks in Paris and Brussels.
(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
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