German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today that Europe need to implement a joint system for dealing with asylum seekers and agree to binding quotas on how to distribute refugees across the continent.

German Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel had earlier said Germany can cope with at least five hundred thousand asylum-seekers a year for several years. Mr Gabriel reiterated that other EU states should share the burden.

He said if countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere continued to resist accepting their fair share of refugees, the bloc's open border regime, known as Schengen, would be at risk. But Merkel said that European Union states need to find a joint solution to the refugee crisis, rather than threatening each other if they did not collaborate.

The U.N. refugee agency said today that it expects the number of refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean to Europe to hit four hundred thousand this year and could be four hundred and fifty thousand or more in 2016.