EU leaders pledged on Friday to “keep up the pressure” on Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to halt the flow of migrants from his country and raised the prospect of new sanctions.
This comes amid calls from some bloc members to build walls and fences to thwart new arrivals.
EU members Poland and Lithuania have been struggling to cope with an unusually high number of migrants arriving at their borders with Belarus in recent months.
The EU is accusing Lukashenko’s government of using migrants to destabilise the 27-country region in retaliation for existing EU sanctions.
After nearly five hours of discussions, EU leaders agreed that they “will not accept any attempt by third countries to instrumentalise migrants for political purposes”.
They also condemned “all hybrid attacks at the EU’s borders”.
Migrant arrivals began increasing a year ago after the EU slapped sanctions on Mr Lukashenko’s government over the country's August 2020 presidential election, which the West views as rigged, and the security crackdown on the Belarusian opposition and peaceful protests that followed.
Leaders promised to continue countering what European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called “state-sponsored smuggling”.
“The people used by Lukashenko are victims, we must help them,” Ms von der Leyen said.
The EU’s executive arm has already proposed to tighten visa restrictions on members of Mr Lukashenko’s government and Ms von der Leyen said the EU is ready to explore additional sanctions against individuals and entities.
Earlier this week, EU foreign ministers discussed possible measures against Belarusian airline Belavia.
Migration has been a sensitive and divisive topic since the arrival in Europe in 2015 of more than one million migrants, most of them refugees fleeing conflict in Syria.
The exodus sparked one of the EU’s biggest political crises and member states have yet to find an agreement on a system that would guarantee shared responsibility for the new arrivals.
A dozen EU countries said before the summit that the bloc should fund the construction of physical barriers to better protect itself.
The European Commission says it has never financed fences, although it acknowledges the right – or need – for EU countries to put up protective barriers.
Ms von der Leyen said that although EU funds are used for border management – including equipment, personnel and logistics – “there will be no funding of barbed wire and walls”.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Ms von der Leyen made it clear the commission would not finance such structures.
“Several powers consider that migration has become an instrument for the destabilisation of Europe,” he said.
“And so, we should protect ourselves. But we should never do so by abandoning our values.”
Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda, who wants a physical barrier on the Baltic country’s border with Belarus, was among those pushing for a review of the bloc’s legislation on migration policy.
Other EU states have been thinking about building fences. Earlier this month, the Polish government approved a bill that would regulate the construction of a high barrier with motion sensors on the border with Belarus to deter people from crossing over.
In their conclusions, leaders invited the commission to propose “any necessary changes to the EU’s legal framework and concrete measures underpinned by adequate financial support”.
“The Lukashenko regime now will see that the European Union is able to react, is able to take the decisions and is ready to defend itself,” Mr Nauseda said.
Thousands of migrants have been lured to Belarus on tourist visas and encouraged to cross into Poland, Lithuania and to a lesser extent Latvia.
Several have died of exhaustion at the Polish-Belarusian border since August, when large numbers of people from Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan, but also from Africa, started trying to cross, hoping to eventually reach western European nations.
Germany said it has noticed an increase of illegal entries along the German-Polish border since August, registering about 4,500 cases.
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
