EU clears way for new Brexit talks

But bloc leaders fail to narrow gap on migrants despite tentative effort

BRUSSELS - European Union leaders have given the go-ahead for Brexit talks with Britain to move on to the next stage, which will involve discussions about future relations and trade.

In a tweet on the second day of an EU summit, EU chief Donald Tusk said that EU leaders "agree to move on to the second phase" in the talks and congratulated British Prime Minister Theresa May.

The clearance provided a welcome boost to May, who earlier this week lost a key parliamentary vote over giving lawmakers the final say on the Brexit deal before Britain leaves the EU in March 2019.

In a breakthrough last week, the two sides agreed that the first round of the Brexit talks had advanced sufficiently for now. It involved Britain's divorce payment, keeping the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland open and sorting out citizens' rights following Brexit.

Meanwhile, two years after the Mediterranean migrant crisis blew a hole in the EU, a tentative effort to patch up differences over what to do with refugees underlined continuing rifts among leaders.

A discussion at the Brussels summit that began on Thursday night and spilled into the wee hours of Friday was intended to clear the air and see if there was a way to reconcile opposing views on how to reform defunct asylum rules.

But leaders emerging from nearly three hours of talks made clear that while there was little of the angry passion of 2015, when a million people flooded into Greece and headed for Germany, the discussion failed to blunt sharp rifts pitting some eastern states against many of the rest.

"We have a lot of work to do," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters. "The positions have not changed."

Divisions over how to share relatively small numbers of refugees have poisoned relations in the EU, complicating efforts to present a united front in talks with London on Brexit and to agree an EU budget out to 2028.

Mandatory share

New Polish and Czech leaders stuck to lines shared with Hungary and Slovakia that their societies cannot accept significant immigration.

Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni were among those who demanded that all countries take in a mandatory share of people requiring asylum - those who have been concentrated on the Mediterranean coast, or displaced by chaotic movements across Europe - in the richer northwest region of the bloc.

German officials said Merkel has been critical of the summit chair, Donald Tusk, a former Polish premier, who in an letter to leaders earlier in the week, said that a controversial scheme of the European Commission - the EU's executive arm - to relocate refugees around the bloc according to mandatory quotas was "ineffective" and "highly divisive".

Ap - Reuters - Afp