Austria should wait for legal report on asylum limit before acting further: president

Austrian president Heinz Fischer has called on the coalition government to wait for a commissioned legal report on the question of a proposed upper limit to asylum seeker numbers before debating the issue further.

In a press release Friday, Fischer said the argument amongst coalition leaders, such as whether the stated limit of 37,500 asylum seekers for the current year the government announced on Wednesday is to be used as an approximate value, or in fact represents a fixed upper limit, is at present premature.

"A dispute over the name given to the proposed objectives -- whether a "guide" or an "upper limit" seems to me to be pointless, as long as the results of the commissioned constitutional and international law report are not at hand," the president wrote.

While he said both he and the majority of the Austrian population understood the efforts are intended to better organize the influx of refugees, Fischer also stressed "the right to asylum as such is not negotiable."

He said, in his opinion, the actual measures the government ends up implementing will hinge largely on the success of peace efforts in conflict areas from which the asylum seekers are coming, and also the actions of other European countries.

In addition, he supported the fair distribution of asylum seekers across Europe, and said the fact that Austria took in 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015 while the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia took in a combined total of about 2,000 was a situation that "cannot exist permanently." Endit